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Teck announces regulatory approval for the Zafranal copper project in Peru

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(Kitco News) - Teck Resources (TSX: TECK.A and TECK.B) (NYSE: TECK) announced today that the Zafranal copper project in Peru has received regulatory approval from SENACE, Peru´s National Service of Environmental Certification for Sustainable Investments.

According to a company statement, Zafranal is a highly competitive, mid-sized copper-gold development project located in the porphyry copper belt of Southern Peru in the Arequipa Region. The deposit is owned by Compañía Minera Zafranal S.A.C., of which Teck owns 80% and Mitsubishi Materials Corporation owns 20%.

Zafranal has an expected mine life of 19 years and will produce copper-gold concentrates through an open-pit mining and conventional concentration process. Copper ore processing, including crushing, grinding, flotation, thickening and filtering, will be carried out in a concentrator plant with a processing capacity of up to 80,000 tonnes of ore throughput per day.

The mine and concentrator are expected to produce an average of 133,000 tonnes of copper contained in concentrate during its first 5 years of production. A feasibility study of the Zafranal project was completed in June 2019 by Ausenco which was updated in January 2020 to include discrete value-added engineering updates.

The company said that moving forward, the Zafranal team will update project capital and operating cost estimates and will develop detailed engineering plans as well as minor permitting activities through 2023, adding that the project could be positioned for a formal project sanction decision as early as H1 2024.

“Regulatory approval of the Zafranal project is an important step forward in our strategy to grow our copper business and unlock significant value for shareholders,” said CEO Jonathan Price. “Zafranal will be a low-cost, long-life operation, and is a key part of Teck’s industry-leading pipeline of high-quality, low-cost copper assets in well-established mining jurisdictions in the Americas.”

Teck is one of Canada’s leading mining companies with major business units focused on copper, zinc, and steelmaking coal.

Copper production in Peru up 20.4% in March as Quellaveco ramps up output, ministry says

By

Vladimir Basov

For Kitco News

Contact vbasov@kitco.com
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