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.
The company announced that June brought record revenues of US$23.8 million and record molybdenum production of 396,184 lbs and the market signaled its appreciation by sending the company’s shares up 8% or 13¢ to $1.71 in Toronto on July 13.
The mine also turned out 3.1 million lbs of copper and 44,596 oz. of silver in concentrates for June.
In total, second quarter production rose up to 9 million lbs of copper, 948,000 lbs of molybdenum and over 117,000 oz. of 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 of copper concentrate, 777,410 lbs of copper cathode, 638,512 lbs of molybdenum and 65,000 oz. of silver.
That increase in production came thanks to more throughput, better head-grades and perhaps most importantly of all, better recoveries of molybdenum 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 successful ramps up, so to has revenue with second quarter revenue coming in at US$56.1 million and operating cash flows coming in at US$25.6 million.
Mercator says operating cash costs for the quarter came in at US$1.88 per lb of copper and US$9.97 per lb of 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 molybdenum and the netting of silver revenue equally.
Milling costs at the mine are also heading in the right direction as they came in at just US$4.89 per ton milled for the quarter and mining costs came in at US$1.09 per ton mined. That’s a significant improvement on costs of US$5.60 per ton milled and US$1.20 per ton mined in the first quarter.
Mineral Park is an open pit mine situated in northwestern Arizona, roughly 120-km southeast of Las Vegas, Nevada.
Over the last two years Mercator has been engaged in a two-phase expansion process, aiming to ramp up to a 50,000 ton per milling operation.
The company reached the 25,000 ton per day level back in 2009 and is targeting production of 56 million lbs of copper, 10 million lbs of molybdenum and 600,000 oz. of silver a year for the first 10 years of a 25-year mine life.
An excellent job performed by the technical personnel and management who operates this mine.