Dual-listed Jubilee Metals Group has successfully concluded further transactions to secure the rights to an additional about 115-million tonnes of copper- and cobalt-containing surface tailings in Zambia.

These transactions are in line with its stated strategy to expand operations in the country and are in addition to the about 155-million tonnes of tailings that have already been secured.

Jubilee has secured the exclusive processing rights to the material through its subsidiary Braemore Platinum, by entering into tailings supply and process development agreements with a number of privately held entities that collectively hold both the mining rights to the tailings and the property title on which the tailings are located.

The agreements include both the formation of a development partnership with a well-established Zambian private entity that has invested in securing various tailings assets, as well as securing the rights to the processing of the tailings from the resource owners.

The agreements give Braemore the exclusive right to process the about 115-million tonnes of tailings through the implementation of a copper and cobalt processing facility.

Moreover, the project benefits from detailed resource analyses and vast historical process test programmes performed by the tailings partners through the appointment of various independent well-established consulting firms, Jubilee points out.

It notes that this affords it the opportunity to interpret these results and incorporate its in-house expertise and intellectual property to significantly accelerate the project development cycle.

Jubilee’s secured pipeline of copper projects in Zambia places the company on track to deliver its stated objective of expanding its copper-producing capacity to in excess of the equivalent of 25 000 t/y of copper units.

The tailings have been previously drilled and sampled to confirm both content and size, containing on average 0.3% copper and 0.05% cobalt.

The combined magnitude of the total secured copper tailings resources and related projects, together with Jubilee’s Sable Refinery, offers the potential to deliver long-term sustained quality earnings making a significant contribution to Jubilee’s existing earnings from its platinum group metal (PGM) and chrome operations in South Africa, the company acclaims.

The Sable Refinery is operationally ready and able to significantly enhance its capacity alongside the expected production build-up, without incurring any significant new capital expenditure, the company notes.

“These agreements, together with the previous rights to material already secured, have resulted in Jubilee having access to an extensive copper- and cobalt-containing resource, which importantly is at surface and able to generate long-term quality earnings.

The implementation of our Zambian copper strategy has been carefully designed and aggressively pursued by the Jubilee team in a very short amount of time. It targets to rapidly replicate at a much larger scale our success achieved in the reprocessing of PGM and chrome tails,” Jubilee CEO Leon Coetzer comments.