On 5 July 2023, the management of the Kamoa-Kakula mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo announced that the Kamoa complex had produced a record 103,786 tonnes of copper concentrate during the second trimester of 2023, despite a relatively difficult environment.
According to executive co-chairman Robert Friedland and president Marna Cloete, the copper complex achieved record production of 103,786 tonnes of copper in concentrate during the second trimester of 2023, despite maintenance shutdowns in June and intermittent grid instability. In detailed figures, they report a record weekly production of 9,710 tonnes of copper and a record average daily throughput of around 30,000 tonnes achieved in July. This record extraction represents an 11% increase in trimesterly production.
This production is largely due to the de-bottlenecking programme, which increased nominal ore processing capacity by 22%. In fact, it went from 7.6 to 9.2 million tonnes of ore per year, which also boosted its production capacity by around 450,000 tonnes of copper concentrate per year. Construction of a concentrator, notably phase 3, with a capacity of 5 million tonnes per year, is already 38% complete, and first production is expected in the fourth trimester of 2024. The new concentrator will be fed by ore from the Kamoa 1 and Kamoa 2 underground mines.
With regard to maintenance work, the mine informs that since the end of the fourth trimester of 2022, Kamoa Copper has been working alongside National Electricity Company (Société nationale d’Electricité – SNEL), the DRC’s state-owned electricity company, to identify the causes of instability in the grid infrastructure in the south of the DRC in order to provide lasting solutions.
The Kamoa-Kakula copper mine – a joint venture between Ivanhoe Mines (39.6%), Zijin Mining Group (39.6%), Crystal River Global Limited (0.8%) and the Government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (20%) – is a large, flat-lying, stratiform copper deposit adjacent to prospective exploration areas in the Central African Copperbelt, about 25 kilometres west of the town of Kolwezi and about 270 kilometres west of the provincial capital of Lubumbashi. Kamoa-Kakula began production of copper concentrates in May 2021 and commercial production on 1 July 2021. Its phased expansion is expected to make Kamoa-Kakula the second largest copper complex in the world. Kamoa-Kakula is powered by renewable hydro-electric power and is expected to be the lowest emitter of greenhouse gases per unit of metal produced, as confirmed by an independent audit conducted in 2020 by Hatch Ltd, Mississauga, Canada. Kakula Mine will have the most favourable environmental footprint of any Tier 1 copper mine in the world. Kakula will also have a relatively small surface footprint. Indeed, approximately 55% of the mine’s tailings will be pumped back into the underground workings. Ivanhoe Mines is committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions (Scope 1 and 2) at the Kamoa-Kakula copper mine.
Tiba Kassamse OUEDRAOGO
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