Central Asia Metals starts copper output in Kazakhstan

London-listed Central Asia Metals said on Wednesday it had launched copper production in Kazakhstan at a plant which extracts the metal from waste dumps left over from Soviet-era mines. Central Asia Metals built the processing plant at the old Kounrad mining site in just 18 months, spending less than the $47 million budgeted for the project which employs 250 people.
"We started producing copper on April 29," Chief Executive Nick Clarke told Reuters in an interview. "This year we expect to produce about 5,000 tonnes." "We built it under budget, for about $42 million, on time, and we are now producing, and so the company is very happy to have its first operating mine in Kazakhstan."
Clarke said he expected the plant's copper cathode output would rise to meet its installed annual capacity of 10,000 tonnes next year. "Then we'll take a decision on whether or not to build another plant to increase production to maybe up to 20,000 tonnes," Clarke said. "Our market will be either Europe, Turkey or China."
Though extensively mapped by Soviet geologists, Kazakhstan, a vast steppe nation five times the size of France, has seen relatively little investment from junior miners to replenish depleting reserves of copper, gold and other industrial and precious metals. Central Asia Metals is one of relatively few junior miners in Kazakhstan to have taken a project through to production, processing copper ore from waste dumps at a deposit once mined by Kazakhmys near the central Kazakh city of Balkhash.
The dumps derived from open-pit mining operations that began in the 1930s and continued until 2005. A pilot plant at the site has produced over 300 tonnes of copper since its launch in August 2008. The leaching technology used by Central Asia Metals is used extensively around the world, particularly in South America and Australia. Less than 15 percent of Kazakhstan's explored metals reserves are currently in production, official data show, with only 75 of 282 identified gold deposits and 19 of 55 iron ore deposits in operation. Another London-listed miner, Frontier Mining, aims to be producing 30,000 tonnes of copper a year from three Kazakh deposits by 2016.