Photo by: Bloomberg
PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Junior IronClad Mining on Thursday reported that it was in discussions with Arrium Mining to potentially sell the direct shipping ore (DSO) from the Wilcherry Hill joint venture (JV), in South Australia.
If an agreement was reached with Arrium, the JV would mine an initial trial pit at Wilcherry Hill, which would generate high-grade DSO for direct sale to Arrium Mining, and which would produce additional bulk samples for ongoing beneficiation testwork.
Mining of the proposed trial pit would start in November this year and would take around five months, IronClad said.
Earlier this month, IronClad amended the production plan at Wilcherry Hill, in response to the falling iron-ore prices. The miner said, at the time, that the Stage 1 pit would now only focus on high-grade DSO, with the starter pit expected to mine only 500 000 t over a six- to seven-month period.
This was compared with the original Stage 1 plan to mine up to one-million tonnes of DSO material.
The Stage 2 operations at Wilcherry Hill, which were targeted to produce high-grade concentrates, would also be brought forward.
The Stage 2 project had initially been expected to start by the third year of project operations, and was expected to produce some two-million tonnes of magnetite concentrate.