Tennant Mining wants to process copper as well as gold

A Territory miner has plans to develop copper processing capacity at its new mine project. Read how they’ll do that.

Copper and critical minerals as well as gold could underpin Tennant Mining’s plans for a processing plant at its Nobles Nob project, 14km east of Tennant Creek.

The Perth-based Tennant Creek prospector is investing $98m into developing a gold processing plant at Nobles to service that and other abandoned Barkly mines, with commissioning expected in the second-half of next year.

Tennant Mining hopes to revive mining in the resource rich town that from the 1940s had some of the county’s most productive gold and copper mines, until large scale mining ended in the Barkly when Giants mine closed in 2004.

Former Department of Trade, Business and Innovation (now DITT) chief executive Michael Tennant, Tennant Mining’s NT manager, said that beyond gold, copper and critical minerals were part of the company’s growth plans.

Tennant Mining’s Michael Tennant at the company’s Eldorado Motel.

As well as its 100 per cent ownership of the Nobles Nob, Warrego and Juno mines, Territory Mining has a partnership with explorer Emmerson giving it access to up to 80 per cent of the Barkly’s mine assets.

He said if the company’s gold salvage operation was successful, it would add a polymetallic flotation circuit to the Nobles processing plant to extract copper and critical minerals.

With the support of a 2022 Resourcing the Territory grant for new critical minerals analysis, the company is looking into the strength of critical minerals identified in the Barkly including cobalt, a multi-function product used in as lithium-ion batteries and car airbags, and bismuth, a copper by-product, have also been identified.

“We’re gold first, copper second and our growth plan includes adding a poly-metallic flotation circuit to the plant that will enable us to process copper and critical minerals,” he said.

“We think and we hope we’ve got a lot more critical minerals than we’ve assayed for in the past and the flotation circuit will enable us to extract all the valued metals and minerals out of that ground.”

A successful diversification from gold to copper and critical minerals could extend the life of the project from eight to 15 years to 30 years and beyond.

“It’s been more than 20 years since large scale mining production ceased and there’s been a lot of attempts by others over that 20 years to restart,” he said.

“The difference is we’ve done is being able get that consolidation in the field.

“Using the hub and spoke model with a central processing facility to be able to secure both our direct acquisition and then with joint venture with Emmerson to get that scale, breadth and depth across the field.

“We are not one mine with one plant, we’re a central plant with more than 10 project areas with between one to four mines on each of those areas. We’re doing further exploration to expand that out so it gives us breadth depth and scale around that and we’ve been working in parallel across everything to get into production.”