Mineral Park Operation

Mineral Park is a brownfields site and is planned to be an open pit mine with mill reserves of 207.6 million tons, containing 587 million pounds of Cu, 149 million pounds of Mo and 14.6 million ounces of Ag.

Project Status

Construction for the mill/concentrator restart commenced in 2023 with mill commissioning in 2025.

Geology

Mineral Park is a porphyry Cu-Mo deposit located in the Cerbat Mountains within the central portion of the Wallapai mining district. The property is underlain by deformed Precambrian metamorphic and igneous rocks which have been intruded by a Laramide-age porphyry complex and rhyolite dike units. Cu, Mo and Ag mineralization at the Mineral Park deposit are hosted in all rock types and spatially distributed in a roughly elliptical annular zone. Several styles and phases of mineralization are observed with Cu, Mo, and Ag hypogene mineralization being the earliest phase and of both stockwork vein infill and disseminated style mineralization. Polymetallic (Zn-Pb-Cu-Ag) subvertical veins crosscutting the early hypogene mineralization are observed. These early mineralization phases are overprinted by development of leached cap, oxide and supergene enrichment horizons.

Mining

Mining will be based on conventional open pit with drill, blast, load and haul to be carried out by contractors. Mineral Park has an initial mine life of 12-years at an average mining rate of 51 thousand tons/day with total ore production of 207 million tons and stripping ratio of 0.14:1 for total material mined of 236 million tons. The haulage fleet is expected to be between ten to fourteen 100-ton haul trucks. Ore will be hauled to one of the two crusher locations and waste will be taken to one of the pre-existing waste rock storage facilities. Mining will be executed on 25-foot-high benches. The mining areas are located around the process facility which allows for optimization of haul routes. Several mining areas are accessible without additional waste rock mining, which provides flexibility in the mine schedule. The mine uses Wi-Fi network coverage to support the use of technology throughout the site, including the use of drones for volumetric measurements.

Metallurgy & Processing

The metallurgical response of the Mineral Park ores has been assessed over multiple testwork phases from 2018 to date. Samples representative of the mine plan have undergone chemical and mineralogical characterization, followed by comminution tests and flotation optimization work. The test results have been used to establish geometallurgical domains and informed the development of criteria used as the basis for processing equipment sizing.

The modernized processing plant consists of a conventional circuit with a nameplate throughput of 50ktpd. Mined ore is fed to a two-stage crushing circuit feeding a crushed ore stockpile. The grinding circuit includes SAG milling, pebble crushing and ball milling with hydrocyclone classification for a 120-micron grinding product. The flotation circuit includes rougher, concentrate regrind, cleaner and copper-molybdenum separation circuits producing marketable copper and molybdenum concentrates.

Infrastructure

Existing onsite infrastructure and services required to support the project include mining and process ancillaries, WRSFs, a mine shop, a refueling station, site roads, administrative buildings, warehousing and security.

Power is supplied by an existing 40-Megawatt gas-fired combined cycle turbine generator with all required distribution infrastructure. Natural gas is supplied from the major east-west pipeline that connects California to Texas and passes near the property, with supplemental power drawn from the grid as required.

Water is supplied by two sets of wells and pumped via pipeline approximately 26 miles to the mine site.

The tailings facility at Mineral Park is constructed using cycloned sand from operations, incorporating advances in tailings deposition operational and technical practices.