OZ Minerals hits the ore body at Carrapateena in a significant milestone for the South Australian miner
OZ Minerals has hit the ore body at its $916 million Carrapateena mine in Far North South Australia in a major milestone for the company.
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OZ Minerals has hit the ore body at its $916 million Carrapateena mine in Far North South Australia in a major milestone for the Adelaide company.
Production is expected to start at the underground mine in the last quarter of this year, and in its quarterly report the company said it remained on time and on budget.
Managing director Andrew Cole said the company had stuck to the schedule first devised in mid-2016, which was testament to the professionalism of the team involved.
The ore would be stockpiled as the shafts developed through the ore body ahead of processing beginning later this year.
At the Prominent Hill mine also in SA the company produced 25,575 tonnes of copper and 32,947 ounces of gold. It reiterated full year guidance of 87-109,000 tonnes of copper and 118-131,000 ounces of gold across that mine and the Antas mine in Brazil.
OZ said its Explorer Challenge, which is a competition with $1 million in prizes for the best analysis of data at one of its SA exploration projects, had attracted entries from 64 different countries.
Mr Cole said there had actually been more entries from artificial intelligence or data science organisations than traditional resources outfits, which was encouraging as the hope was to flush out new approaches to exploration. OZ has also earned its 70 per cent stake at the West Musgrave project and yesterday released a resource upgrade to 141 million tonnes of ore at the copper and nickel project.
“The current study phase has been focused on developing core mining and processing concepts and we are investigating a range of new opportunities to increase project value,’’ Mr Cole said.
The company said it had a strong cash balance of $342 million and also had a new revolving $300 million facility for general corporate purposes.
OZ shares were 15c lower at $10.58.
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