BRITISH COLUMBIA –
Copper Mountain Mining announced that, following its 2019 exploration and development drilling, it has expanded its namesake mine’s mineral reserve and mineral resource, while at the same time optimizing the mine plan.
The Copper Mountain mine is a conventional open pit, truck and shovel operation located 20 km south of Princeton.
The updated mine plan and mineral reserve and resource resulted in a 12% increase in proven and probable mineral reserves to 477 million tonnes for contained metal of 2.47 billion lb. of copper and 1.55 million oz. of gold at average grades of 0.23% copper and 0.10 g/t gold.
Total measured and indicated mineral resources at a 0.10% Cu cut-off grade was estimated at 598.8 million tonnes with 0.23% copper, 0.10 g/t gold, 0.73 g/t silver.
At the same time, the life of mine strip ratio was reduced to 1.58 from 1.81 and the mine life was increased by 4.5 years to 31 years at current planned production levels.
“We continue to grow the size and quality of the Copper Mountain mine mineral reserves. Over the last year we have integrated the New Ingerbelle pit and now we have increased and integrated the CMM North pit as well as optimized the CMM Main pit,” Gil Clausen, the company’s president and CEO, said in a media statement.
According to Clausen, the North pit brings low cost production given it is mineralized from surface and adjacent to the Copper Mountain mine’s mid-grade and low-grade stockpiles and the primary crusher.
“Notably, the North pit requires zero initial capital to develop and has a low strip ratio of 0.85 waste tonnes to ore tonnes, which, when combined with the new design optimizations of the established pits, decreases total life of mine strip ratio for the entire operation to 1.58 from 1.82,” the executive explained.
This story originally appeared on www.Mining.com.
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