Copper Mountain Mining (TSX: CMMC, ASX:C6C) announced that, following its 2019 exploration and development drilling, it has expanded its namesake mine’s mineral reserve and mineral resource, while at the same time optimizing the mine plan.
The Copper Mountain mine is a conventional open-pit, truck-and-shovel operation located 20 kilometres south of Princeton in southern British Columbia, Canada.
Copper Mountain says it will continue to drill the resources at the mine as significant potential exists to further expand all the deposits at a low conversion and discovery cost
The updated mine plan and mineral reserve and resource resulted in a 12% increase in proven and probable mineral reserve to 477 million tonnes for contained metal of 2.47 billion pounds of copper and 1.55 million ounces of gold at average grades of 0.23% Cu and 0.10 g/t Au.
Total measured & indicated mineral resource at a 0.10% Cu cut-off grade was estimated in 598.8 million tonnes with 0.23% copper, 0.10 g/t gold, 0.73 g/t silver.
At the same time, the life of mine strip ratio was reduced to 1.58 from 1.81 and the mine life was increased by 4.5 years to 31 years at current planned production levels.
“We continue to grow the size and quality of the Copper Mountain mine mineral reserves. Over the last year we have integrated the New Ingerbelle pit and now we have increased and integrated the CMM North pit as well as optimized the CMM Main pit,” Gil Clausen, the company’s president and CEO, said in a media statement.
According to Clausen, the North pit brings low cost production given it is mineralized from surface and adjacent to the Copper Mountain mine’s mid-grade and low-grade stockpiles and the primary crusher.
“Notably, the North pit requires zero initial capital to develop and has a low strip ratio of 0.85 waste tonnes to ore tonnes, which, when combined with the new design optimizations of the established pits, decreases total life of mine strip ratio for the entire operation to 1.58 from 1.82,” the executive explained.