Teck Resources Limited has announced that the Zafranal copper project in Peru has been approved by SENACE, Peru’s National Service of Environmental Certification for Sustainable Investments.
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A mid-sized, fiercely competitive copper-gold development project called Zafranal is situated in the porphyry copper belt of southern Peru's Arequipa Region. Compañía Minera Zafranal S.A.C. is the company that owns the deposit; Teck owns 80% of it, and Mitsubishi Materials Corporation owns 20%.
Regulatory approval of the Zafranal Project is an important step forward in our strategy to grow our copper business and unlock significant value for shareholders. Zafranal will be a low-cost, long-life operation, and is a key part of Teck’s industry-leading pipeline of high-quality, low-cost copper assets in well-established mining jurisdictions in the Americas.
Jonathan Price, Chief Executive Officer, Teck Resources Limited
Zafranal, located in the Arequipa area of southern Peru, has a mine life of 19 years and will produce copper-gold concentrates by open-pit mining and conventional concentrating. Crushing, grinding, flotation, thickening, and filtering of copper ore will take place in a concentrator facility with a processing capacity of up to 80,000 tons of ore per day.
During its first five years of operation, the mine and concentrator are planned to generate an average of 133,000 tons of copper in the concentrate.
Ausenco performed a feasibility study for the Zafranal Project in June 2019, previously amended in January 2020 to include discrete value-added engineering modifications.
The Zafranal team will continue to update project capital and operational cost estimates, as well as prepare comprehensive engineering designs and minor permitting processes through 2023. As early as H1 2024, the project could be ready for a formal project sanction decision.
The Zafranal Project’s regulatory approval is another step in the right direction for Teck’s plan to progress its market-leading Copper Growth portfolio in a responsible and timely way.
Source: https://www.teck.com/