This offtake contract covers 100% of cathodes produced and delivered to Port Hedland, and has an preliminary mounted time period. The sale contract would run from 2026, the earliest doubtless date that Nifty would possibly produce concentrates, the corporate stated.
The deal would additionally see Glencore make all affordable efforts to think about delivering these concentrates to the Mt Isa smelter, which serves one of many world’s largest mining complexes and the second-largest copper producer in Australia.
Topic to last agreements, the Swiss-based group will make a A$20 million prepayment on the copper manufacturing to speed up development of a brand new floor mine in addition to present working capital to maneuver the acquisition level to Nifty.
Different features of the partnership embrace an choice for Cyprium to buy sulphuric acid to get rid of uncertainty in provide in addition to technical help from Glencore.
“This industrial partnership offers us certainty of income in the course of the essential startup phases of Nifty’s two processing crops, removes uncertainty in sourcing a key enter into cathode manufacturing, and aligns with creating and sustaining a robust Australian job base within the final important mineral, copper,” said Cyprium’s govt chair Matt Fifield.
Positioned on the western fringe of the Nice Sandy Desert within the northeastern Pilbara area, the Nifty mine started operations in 1993 as an open pit oxide copper mine, then transitioned to an underground sulphide mine in 2006.
Between graduation of the oxide operation and November 2019, when the mine was positioned onto care and upkeep, Nifty has produced greater than 700,000 tonnes of copper metallic. Cyprium acquired 100% of the Nifty undertaking in March 2021 as half of a bigger transaction with Metals X (ASX: MLX).
A useful resource assertion put out earlier this yr estimated a complete useful resource of 125 million tonnes averaging 0.83% copper for 1.04 million tonnes of the metallic. Many of the useful resource is within the indicated class, at 80.9 million tonnes grading 0.79% for 635,765 tonnes of copper.