Jubilee is involved in copper in Zambia as well as chrome and platinum group metals in South Africa.
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Jubilee Metals Group, the diversified metals recovery company with operations in South Arica and Zambia, said Wednesday that the trials of processing various high-grade copper ores at its Roan concentrator are nearing completion.
The results from these trials will be used to select material for a long-term supply agreement, the company said in an update of its Zambia operations on the JSE’s news service.
Finalisation of the trials on the various types of high-grade materials will be completed over the coming two weeks, which is critical to the selection of the optimal mix of high-grade copper materials.
“The initial results have confirmed the potential for Roan to maintain a significant increase in copper production rate on the high-grade copper material, which supports the decision to transition Roan to this high-grade material from initially dedicating capacity to processing copper tailings,” the group said.
Because the various mineralogical compositions of the different materials required circuit adjustments to Roan to optimally process each material, the final trial results were slightly delayed.
“There remain two further material compositions that will be trialed over the coming two weeks.”
The ramp-up of the Munkoyo Open-Pit mine operations was on target to achieve 8 500 ton permonth (tpm) of high-grade ROM (run-of-mine), exceeding 2% copper (equating to 170 tpm), with a further 75 000 tpm of lower-grade ROM stockpiled at the operations.
In addition, the recently announced trading of 10 Mt from the estimated 260 Mt of material in Jubilee's Large Waste Project has commenced, with first payments received.
"These trials have vindicated our decision to prioritise the processing of the high-grade copper material. Over the past six weeks, four material types of varying grades and composition of copper within the overall 6 Mt of high-grade, previously mined material have been processed at Roan. Each material type has shown a unique property that requires a dedicated processing configuration at Roan with varying metallurgical performance,” said Jubilee CEO Leon Coetzer in a statement..
Jubilee’s share price fell 3.66% to 79 cents on the JSE by the close of trade on Wednesday. The price is well down from R1.70 it traded at a year before.
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