Kuvimba to splurge US$220m

CLOUDINE MATOLA

Resources concern, Kuvimba Mining House, will inject US$220m  in infrastructure development for its lithium mining unit,Sandawana Mines, located in Mberengwa district, Midlands Province, Business Times can report.

The plan was revealed yesterday by Trevor Barnard, the director of Energy Cluster at Kuvimba Mining House. He stated that among other necessities, the funds will be used to assemble the mine and build community houses and roads.

In the past, Sandawana Mine was an emerald mine. About 18 years ago, lithium was discovered, and Kuvimba Mining House, a significant Sandawana Mines shareholder, made the decision to start an exploration effort.

“The total capital expenditure for this phase is estimated at around US$220m that will take us to be able to construct the plant and all the associated infrastructure around which include road works, electrical power, water and housing,among many projects,” Barnard said.

According to him, the mine will be generating spodumene concentrate, which is generally accepted internationally for the battery industry, with a purity of roughly  5% or 6% lithium.

The exploration project, Benard said began this year and consists of four phases. The first phase, which should be finished by the end of this month, is currently underway and involves drilling and chemical analysis.

“We started that  in the beginning of this year. So its divided into four phases of which we have completed the first phase. The drilling of the first phase and also the chemical analysis of the first phase will be completed by end of this month,” he said.

Based on the findings, the miner anticipate declaring a substantial resource of about 30m tonnes of lithium at a grade of about 1.6%, which depends on the cutoff grade.

He added that phase two of the exploration has begun, and drilling is still going on. In addition, they anticipate that phase two will be completed by the first quarter of next year and that the resource’s size will have doubled.

Furthermore, he stated that they anticipate a resource size of about 100m  from phases 3 and 4, though this is not confirmed at this time.

“We are also doing further phases of the exploration, phase 3 and 4. And overall expectation is that we would end up at a resource size of around 100m tonnes in totality that can’t be confirmed at this stage but certainly that is from our initial  exploration expectations and evidence that we found on site so from that perspective this would be really one of our biggest in the world. So what we do about that, the next step is the development of the mine and the project,” he said.

Barnard states that at Sandawana Mine, there will be numerous open pits for both a large mine and a processing mine.

“Firstly we decide to develop 3m tons per annum mine and processing plant at Sandawana Mine in the short term, because of the purity and simplicity of our geology that we only have one lithium mineral called spodumene.

“We will be able to build a very basic and conventional mining process and it will be an open pit mine and would probably consist of various open pits across the resource,

“And the processing plant will consist of typical crushing, screening followed by milling and flotation section and then a drying and packing section,” he said.

According to Barnard, because of volume, the concentrate, which is anticipated to be between 500 000 and 600 000 tonnes annually for the first phase, will be exported through Beira, Maputo, and Durban; the majority of the product will then  go to China for further processing.