Lady Annie steps up to producer Chris LeitchFriday, 28...

Lady Annie steps up to producer

Chris Leitch
Friday, 28 September 2007

COPPER has begun flowing from CopperCo's processing plant at its Lady Annie project in north-west Queensland, marking the company's transition from explorer to producer.



CopperCo's Lady Annie deposit


CopperCo's solvent extraction and electrowinning process plants have been progressively commissioned over the past few weeks and the company said the plating of copper has begun.

A-grade copper cathode is expected to be stripped and packaged for shipment over the coming week and full production at 19,000 tonnes per annum is expected by next month.

Copper cathode shipments to Townsville will commence in the first week of October for sale to Glencore International, who has an offtake agreement with CopperCo.

CopperCo's general manager of exploration and business development Simon Pooley told MiningNews.net it was just on three years since the company formed to explore the project, which had never had its copper potential seriously investigated.

"With oxide copper in Queensland, there had been a few explorers through that area but they were principally looking for your deeper Mt Isa-style sulphide cache," he said.

"Nobody had really tried to pull together a set of tenements to get an oxide project up and running. I think that had something to do with heap leach technology not being terribly well understood during the mid-90s.

"There have been improvements on that side and the fact we have an experienced management team in that style of processing, we've been able to get it up and moving."

He said there had been many hurdles to underpin the 19,000-tonne operation and also the 25,000 tonne per annum upgrade which the company hopes to bring on next year.

"When we first incepted we advised the market that our focus was going to be purely getting our Lady Annie project up and running," he said.

"We were going to maintain that focus in terms of being a pure copper play; we didn't want to divest ourselves in anyway but just get the project moving."

Pooley said CopperCo was going to continue exploring around the outside of the current resource in an effort to expand Lady Annie but it would also begin exploring other projects.

"We believe there is still significant exploration potential in terms of oxide and most definitely sulphide discovery (at Lady Annie) and we will look a little further afield in the medium term," he said.

The mine's resource was announced to the market earlier this month as 33.08 million tonnes at 0.8% copper for 294,400 tonnes of contained copper.

Shares in CopperCo rose 8c to close at $1.16 on the back of yesterday's announcement and they were trading today at $1.17 in late morning trade.