Canada’s Ivanhoe Mines (TSX: IVN) said on Tuesday that expansion of its Kamoa-Kakula mine in Democratic Republic of Congo, the biggest copper operation to come online in decades, is ahead of scheduled, with full production now expected in the second quarter next year.
Construction of the mine Phase 2’s concentrator plant was originally expected to finish in the summer of 2022, the company said. The 3.8 million-tonne-per-annum (Mtpa) facility, a “carbon copy” of the Phase 1 plant, has been designed to double production to about 400,000 tonnes of copper a year.
The Vancouver-based company said that as of the end of September, the Phase 2 plant was more than 50% complete. Kamoa-Kakula, the biggest copper mine to come online in decades, began production on May 25 and made its first delivery of bulk concentrates to the Lualaba Copper Smelter on June 1.
Since then, shipments to the smelter have been occurring daily, the company said. Ivanhoe inked a deal in June with China’s Zijin Mining’s DRC subsidiary and trader Citic Metal to sell each 50% of the copper production from the copper mine.
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