Copper Industry News Roundup

SHANGHAI, Jul 19 (SMM) - A weekly update on the trending stories from the Copper Industry.

1. American mining giant Freeport McMoRan will cancel plans to establish a new copper smelter with China Tsingshan Holdings Group (its local subsidiary in Indonesia).

The Indonesian authorities have reported that Indonesia Freeport and Tsingshan will reach an agreement to build a new copper smelter worth $2.8 billion.

Freeport Indonesia plans to build a new smelter near its existing copper refinery in Gresik, East Java.

Indonesia Freeport announced on July 15 that it has signed an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract with Japanese engineering company Chiyoda to build a new Gresik smelter with an annual production capacity of 1.7 million mt of copper concentrate.

2. Copper Fox announced that the Eaglehead polymetallic porphyry copper project in northwestern British Columbia has started its 2021 plan.

Eaglehead has a total area of 15,956 hectares and is an intrusive rock-alkaline polymetallic (Cu-Mo-Au-Ag) porphyry copper system, located in the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic multi-facies, granodiorite/diorite In the intrusive rock group, it is about 50 km east of Lake Diss in the territory of Tartan.

Copper Fox President and CEO Elmer B. Stewart said that historical drilling is basically limited to four mineralised zones. These zones cover a small part of the Eaglehead intrusion, which has proven to be a promising large-scale porphyry copper deposit based on trace element chemistry. The systematic mapping and exploration of the Eaglehead intrusion has not yet been completed. The area north of the mineralisation zone has very promising prospects for porphyry mineralisation. The focus of the 2021 plan is to assess the prospects of the area for porphyry-type mineralisation and to expand geophysical coverage before the potential 2022 diamond drilling program.

3. Canada’s Taseko Mines revealed that the permitting timetable for its Florence copper mine project in Arizona was further delayed because the company tried to convince the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the mine would not harm the country’s water supply.

The Vancouver-based miner plans to inject sulfuric acid and water deep underground to break down the deposits, a process that triggered fracturing in the oil field. Uranium miners in rural Australia and the United States have used this method for decades, but in-situ leaching is rarely used in copper mining.