‘Everything needs electricity and the carrier of electricity is copper,’ points out CEO Jan Nelson.
Download the free LiSTN audio app on Google Play, Apple or here.
JAN NELSON: I think both. It means it’s on surface, so one can start mining from the surface. But these deposits, as we’ve drilled them, are also open to depth. And they’re quite big deposits. They are large, they’re 50m by 400m ore bodies that go down for 400m and are open-ended. JAN NELSON: Yes, the business has evolved in two halves. The first part was all the loose rock that was left down by the previous mining companies that mined here, and they didn’t really rehabilitate. We found that there was copper in those loose rock dumps, which we are now processing through the SX-EW plant, which makes copper plates.
But certainly for a junior company of our nature, mining at a smaller rate and concentrating more on grade as opposed to volume, there are still massive deposits for us. So I think they certainly have the technology to deal with these mines. But it was a question of the copper price slumping, and I think that these mines weren’t of a certain critical size and their exploration stopped.
But then the grades are also phenomenal. Some of the sampling was running at 17%. At Wheal Julia we’ve had 4-8% copper on surface. JAN NELSON: Very good. We have raised since the listing an additional R350 million, of which about 80% of that is debt instruments, so we’ve been careful about not diluting our shareholders. And then we do have a facility currently in place for about another R600 million. So we have about R800 million in terms of facilities that we can use – and that will be applied over the next two years in terms of our capital growth programme.