Mercator Minerals (ML-T) continues to shape its Mineral Park mine in Arizona into one of North America’s more significant copper and molybdenum mines.
On July 13, the company announced that June brought record revenues of US$23.8 million and record moly production of 396,184 lbs. and investors signaled their appreciation by sending the company’s shares up 8% or 13¢ to $1.71.
The mine also turned out 3.1 million lbs. copper and 44,596 oz. silver in concentrates for June.
In total, second quarter production rose up to 9 million lbs. copper, 948,000 lbs. moly and more than 117,000 oz. silver.
Copper production breaks down into 8.18 million lbs. in concentrate and 824,966 lbs. of cathode copper.
Those numbers tell more of a story when compared with first quarter production of 5.4 million lbs. copper concentrate, 777,410 lbs. copper cathode, 638,512 lbs. moly and 65,000 oz. silver.
That increase in production came thanks to more throughput, better head grades and perhaps most importantly of all, better recoveries of moly and copper.
Mercator expects that recoveries will continue to improve when additional rougher tanks are added at the end of September. The tanks will allow for more residence time for the metals, which should result in increased recoveries.
And as production successfully ramps up, so has returns with second quarter revenue coming in at US$56.1 million and operating cash flows at US$25.6 million.
Mercator says operating cash costs for the quarter were US$1.88 per lb. copper and US$9.97 per lb. molybdenum. Those figures were arrived at on a co-product basis where costs are divided proportionally based on the percentage of revenue from copper and moly and the netting of silver revenue equally.
Milling costs at the mine are also heading in the right direction, with US$4.89 per tonne milled for the quarter and mining costs were at US$1.09 per tonne mined. That’s a significant improvement on costs of US$5.60 per tonne milled and US$1.20 per tonne mined in the first quarter.
Mineral Park is an open-pit mine in northwestern Arizona, roughly 120 km southeast of Las Vegas.
Over the last two years, Mercator has been engaged in a two-phase expansion process, aiming to ramp up to a 50,000-tonne-per-day milling operation.
The company reached the 25,000-tonne-per-day level in 2009 and is targeting production of 56 million lbs. copper, 10 million lbs. moly and 600,000 oz. silver a year for the first 10 years of a 25-year mine life.
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