(Kitco News) - McEwen Copper initial public offering is scheduled for the first half of next year, said McEwen Copper's Vice President Michael Meding.
Meding spoke to Kitco on Friday.
McEwen Copper is a subsidiary of McEwen Mining (NYSE: MUX). McEwen Copper is advancing its Los Azules copper project, located in the San Juan province of Argentina. The company describes Los Azules as one of the largest undeveloped copper assets in the world. In August McEwen Copper announced a $25 million investment by Rio Tinto.
Financing is hard with monetary policy reducing liquidity, but Meding said a mine developed at Los Azules can be developed in stages using heap leach technology. The company plans to commercially deploy Rio Tinto’s Nuton Technologies for copper leaching
"In conversations with bankers, majors and potential investors, the message was that at the moment it is difficult to get capital for a $4 to $6 billion project...[but] a mine where you start with heap leaching is scalable from a capex point of view," said Meding.
The next milestones for McEwen Copper are a drill program, which runs from October 2022 to June 2023, and the completion of an updated preliminary economic assessment in early 2023, as well as the IPO.
Meding previously worked for Barrick Gold and helped turnaround the Veladero mine in Argentina.
