Zinc Tailings Provide Profitable Processing
COMMODITY CAPERS: New Century Resources (ASX: NCZ) has taken recycling and sustainability to new levels.
In its own words the company is, “a leading mining, tailings management and economic rehabilitation company focused on sustainably producing metal from resource assets while rehabilitating legacy impacts to the environment”.
New Century Resources achieved status as a top-15 global zinc producer via unconventional means.
The company operates Australia’s largest hydraulic mine at the Century Mine in Queensland, an operation that entails extracting, processing, and marketing zinc recovered from historical tailings.
Its success at doing so resulted in the ASX recently reclassifying the company from a ‘mining exploration entity’ to that of a ‘mining producing entity’ as defined under due to consistent revenue and cashflow from production over a period of more than 12 months.
The Century mine is located north-west of Mount Isa and began open-pit production in 1999.
During its initial 16 years of operation, Century was one of the largest zinc mines in the world, producing and processing an average of 475,000 tonnes per annum zinc in concentrate and 50,000tpa lead in concentrates.
Following the depletion of the original ore reserve, the mine was put on care and maintenance in 2016.
Enter, New Century Resources, which acquired the operation in 2017 from MMG, with the idea of re-starting operations through the reprocessing of tailings through the extensive infrastructure in place.
The operation is simple; tailings ore is hydraulically mined then pumped to the existing processing plant to remove remnant zinc prior to pumping back into the original open pit for final storage.
This economic rehabilitation strategy reduces the environmental footprint of site whilst providing a foundation for life extension through the future processing of substantial mineral deposits on site.
The 7 million tonnes per annum capacity hard rock processing plant has been refurbished to process up to 12 million tonnes per annum of tailings ore.
The plant also has latent capacity to process up to 1 million tonnes per annum of hard rock ore concurrently with tailings.
While production ticks over at the Century mine, New Century Resources is exploring the potential restart of copper production at the historical Mt Lyell mine in Tasmania using 100 per cent renewable energy.
New Century is also pursuing opportunities with industry peers to reprocess and rehabilitate contemporary and historical mineralised waste assets at operational and legacy mine sites where it hopes to instigate its expertise in economic rehabilitation.
Email: info@newcenturyresources.com
Web: www.newcenturyresources.com
Directors: Robert McDonald, Patrick Walta, Nick Cernotta, Peter Watson, Kerry Gleeson
