Suppliers News (November 12, 2007)

GRD Minproc gets date with Santa Rita

GRD Minproc will design, build and manage Mirabela Nickel’s (MNB-T, MRBAF-O) US$263-million Santa Rita nickel project in Brazil.

Mirabela’s feasibility study says Santa Rita will be a 4.6-million-tonne-per-year open-pit mine with a conventional sulphide concentrator designed to produce 18,500 tonnes nickel concentrate annually.

GRD Minproc previously completed the feasibility study for Santa Rita.

“Santa Rita is a superb project with a world-class resource as well as excellent existing infrastructure; this will make construction and getting product to market very efficient,” says GRD chief executive Cliff Lawrenson.

“We are very impressed with the Mirabela management team who have taken the best of Brazil and the best of Australia and put together a world-class team to deliver the project.”

The resource, inside the pit, amounts to 69 million measured and indicated tonnes grading 0.61% nickel and 0.15% copper, plus an inferred resource of another 7 million tonnes grading 0.53% nickel and 0.15% copper. The pit design shows a stripping ratio of 7.7 and the resource has an average cutoff grade of 0.38% nickel.

The resource is based on 313 drill holes and 73,500 metres of drilling. Another 27 holes Mirabela has drilled since work started on the resource estimate, including some holes on the deposit’s Southern Deeps zone, are not part of the figure.

SGS opens Russian lab

SGS has opened a geochemical and metallurgical lab in Chita, Russia, the company’s largest investment in Russia so far.

SGS sees Russia as a growing market for geochemical and metallurgical analysis.

The lab is the largest metallurgical laboratory in Russia and most of the technology in it hails from Canada.

The Chita geochemical laboratory is equipped with a high-volume sample preparation facility; multi-pour fire assay technology; inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy; atomic absorption spectroscopy; carbon/sulphur and classical analytical methods for the analysis of gold, platinum, palladium, base metals, major oxides and refractories, trace and pathfinder elements. The Chita lab can process more than 1 million fire assays each year.

The Chita metallurgical laboratory also provides testing for flow-sheet development and geometallurgy on base metals, iron ore, gold ore projects and has pressure oxidation and biological leaching capacity for refractory gold ore. SGS will conduct additional testing at other facilities as necessary.

This new facility will be accredited to the ISO/IEC 17025 standard.

SGS has over 8,000 employees in a network of 1,000 offices and laboratories throughout the world.

Aker Kvaerner finds more work in Chile

Antofagasta Minerals (ANFGY-O, ANTO-L) has awarded engineering firm Aker Kvaerner’s Chilean subsidiary a US$35-million engineering, procurement, and construction management contract to develop the Esperanza copper-gold project, located in northern Chile.

It will take about US$1.5 billion to get the project into production.

Aker Kvaerner conducted the feasibility study and early works studies for Esperanza from August 2006 until September 2007. The next stage in development will happen in two phases. The first phase will supply engineering and procurement, and the next will involve construction management. Aker Kvaerner’s US$35-million contract is for the first phase.

Aker Kvaerner will design the facilities to produce copper concentrates and the early works facility for ore extracted from the Esperanza deposit.

The second phase will involve building mine infrastructure, port facilities, a seawater pipeline to feed the process plant, and a long- distance ore pipeline for copper concentrates. The contract for the second phase was not awarded but Aker Kvaerner has the first option on it.

Esperanza is a sulphide deposit in northern Chile’s Region II, about 4 km south of Antofagasta’s El Tesoro copper mine, at 2,100 metres above sea level.

Esperanza will produce copper concentrate containing gold and silver byproduct credits via conventional milling and flotation. Ore throughput is expected to average 97,000 tonnes per day.

Each year Esperanza is expected to produce roughly 700,000 tonnes of concentrate containing 195,000 tonnes payable copper, 229,000 oz. payable gold and 1.55 million oz. payable silver.

Esperanza is now going through an environmental evaluation.

Norway’s Aker Kvaerner has aggregated annual revenue of about 50 billion Norwegian kroner ($8.63 billion) and employs roughly 23,000 people in about 30 countries.

Scandinavian orders mills for Kevitsa

Scandinavian Minerals (SGL-T, SCANF-O) has ordered $20 million in grinding mills for the company’s Kevitsa nickel-copper-platinum group elements project in Finland.

The mills have been ordered from Finland’s Outotec, once the engineering and technology arm of Finnish miner Outokumpu. The mills should arrive in the first quarter of 2010.

In June, Scandinavian hired Outotec to carry out engineering work at Kevitsa, including the design of the planned processing plant, part of an ongoing feasibility study.

The autogenous grinding mills will be designed to process roughly 5 million tonnes of ore annually. They were ordered following comminution test work by Orway Mineral Consultants in Australia.

“Current long-lead times for mineral processing equipment, especially grinding mills, highlight the importance of ordering such equipment as soon as the design criteria are sufficiently clear,” says Peter Walker, Scandinavian’s president and CEO.

In April, Scandinavian started the feasibility study, which is being co-ordinated by London, U.K.-based St Barbara, formerly St Barbara Consultancy Services of London.

The metallurgical process was developed by the Mineral Processing Laboratory of the Geological Survey of Finland, and Outotec is taking care of plant engineering and design. The study is expected to be complete in the second quarter of 2008.

The feasibility is based on an open-pit operation mining roughly 5 million tonnes of ore per year, with production of nickel and copper concentrates for sale to local or overseas smelters.