TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Junior Cancana Resources on Wednesday announced that it had hired contract-mining crews to execute infrastructure development and mine site preparatory work, before commercial mining would start in about ten days at its Valdirao mine, in Espigao, in Brazil's Rondonia state.

Cancana in July announced that the local Department of Mines for Mineral Production had issued it a trial mining licence on its manganese claim, paving the way forward to start mining.

Once the infrastructure is complete, Cancana would immediately start mining and stockpiling unprocessed manganese ore.

Manganese is an important element in modern steelmaking and used as a treatment for rust and corrosion prevention in steel.

The infrastructure would include establishing gated access, fencing to delineate roadways and areas of mining, grading of access roads and traversing road cuts across the hillside and the mining area for equipment access.

Cancana said it expected this preparatory and infrastructure work to take about ten days to complete and then, as mining starts, there would be ongoing work to maintain access and establish new areas and extensions for access throughout the Valdirao mining area.

The Valdirao mine site is situated on an area of about 5 ha, with an incline to the top of a ridge.

Cancana, as part of its infrastructure planning, had ordered two transportable dry screens, through which the soils and manganese ore would be screened. The void spacing on these screens is 15 cm on the first screen and 7 cm on the second screen.

The soil and ore would be loaded onto these screens, manually agitated to extract larger lump ore, after which stockpiles of ore will be created. Finer screening, crushing, washing and final sizing would be completed at a later date.

"We are very excited about this progress as it is another milestone towards becoming a producing mine,” Cancana president and CEO Andrew Male said.

The Valdirao mine would target initial production of 18 000 t to 20 000 t in 2013 and ramp up to 100 000 t in 2014.

The Valdirao deposit currently has a National Instrument 43-101-compliant inferred resource of 35 000 t of manganese with an average grade of 54%.

The company’s TSX-V-listed stock closed sharply higher on Wednesday, having gained 30.77% to C$0.17 apiece.