Focus on processing as AIC executes expansion plans

Cranking up the processing plant at Eloise is a key plank of AIC Mines' strategy to push the life of the copper operation beyond 2030 and bring further deposits online. GR Engineering Services is expected to complete its study this month on expansion options, and AIC Mines aims to have the engineering and design work completed this year. "The two things with Eloise (processing plant) is it's now over 20 years old and needs some love, plus it has 725,000 tonnes per annum capacity. That's a little bit subscale," AIC Mines managing director Aaron Colleran said. AIC Mines is planning to boost that to somewhere between 1 million and 1.4 million tonnes per annum through a staged expansion. The Eloise plant expansion will happen in tandem with the planned portal and decline development at the nearby Jericho project so that it is ready when the extra ore starts rolling in. Preliminary study findings indicate that a staged expansion of the Eloise processing plant offers the best path forward. This would allow AIC to reduce the amount of upfront funding required and to better understand the processing bottlenecks, Mr Colleran said. "Preliminary work shows that it definitely needs a new crushing circuit and it definitely needs a new concentrate thickening circuit," Mr Colleran said. "So those two pieces will get the go ahead. And they could lift production to a million tonnes per annum. Thereafter the bottleneck will be grinding." Related: AIC boosts coffers to step up Eloise operations Having a staged approach meant AIC would be able to see what could be gained through those two key upgrades before committing to significant work on the grinding circuit. "With a first step of just upgrading crushing and thickening, we could get a long way to the magic plus-one-million-tonne-per-annum throughput that we're chasing at a lower capital cost, and less interruption on the current plant," Mr Colleran said. "We can build those two pieces (a new crushing circuit and new thickening circuit) basically standalone and then as we bring them online there won't be a lot of downtime. Whereas if we put a new milling circuit in place as well, there's potentially more downtime." The Eloise deposit - 60km south-east of Cloncurry - was discovered by BHP Minerals in 1988 and first mined by Amalg Resources in 1996 before being divested to FMR Investments in 2004. AIC Mines acquired the mine from FMR Investments in 2021 for $27 million. Mr Colleran said FMR had been running the asset to closure and was not prepared to commit to the new tailings storage facility required to continue production beyond this year. "We saw opportunity well beyond that, and we saw the opportunity within the region to add on additional resources, to expand and create a cornerstone asset for AIC Mines," he said. "We saw the first step in consolidating the region was to own the processing plant. So that's exactly what we did in November 2021. "We acquired it, and we committed to building a new tailings dam, TD5, which has just been completed at cost of $15 million. "Then late last year we launched the takeover offer for Demetallica, our neighbor. We turned our five square kilometres of leaseholding to 2000 square kilometres." Related: AIC Mines takeover of Demetallica complete The company views development of the Jericho deposit acquired in its Demetallica takeover as being transformational for Eloise by offering the potential to increase annual production to more than 20,000t copper in concentrate, reduce costs through economies of scale, and materially extend the mine life. Meanwhile in just six months of drilling at Eloise in the last half of 2022, the new owners were also able to increase Eloise reserves by 46 per cent and resources by 19 per cent. "The Eloise mine is producing 600-650,000 tons per annum and our current life-of-mine plan says it can continue to do that out to at least 2030," Mr Colleran said. "Our ongoing exploration, ongoing resource definition drilling continues to push that end date out as we discover new ore. "... We basically finished the year (2022) with a larger resource and larger reserve than we started the year. It would be great to do that every year. "That's the plan - to continue to extend the resource along strike and at depth and still be mining at Eloise well beyond 2030. And that's why we're expanding the plant with Jericho rather than just extending the life of the operation."

Focus on processing as AIC executes expansion plans

Industry Queensland

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