Caravel nails copper concentrate quality

Caravel Minerals has successfully produced a copper concentrate product with very low levels of impurities such as arsenic using composite samples from its Caravel project in WA’s Wheatbelt region.

Management said that based on the low level of impurities, the project’s clean concentrate is likely to be sought after by copper smelters for blending with more complex concentrates that contain impurities above the accepted threshold levels.

As such, the clean copper concentrate specification could also form part of the company’s discussions with potential concentrate off‐take parties.

The Caravel concentrate contains about 25% copper, 26.5% iron and 29.3% sulphur.

Crucially, it contains less than 0.01% arsenic, which is at least 10 times lower than the threshold level where penalties would apply.

Other impurities such as cadmium, selenium, antimony and lead are also a magnitude or more under the typical threshold limits for smelters.

In April, Caravel said that metallurgical test work carried out on ores from the project indicated that it could be easily treated using standard processing techniques with high recoveries of about 92%.

It noted that the copper minerals are highly hydrophobic and require low reagent doses to obtain high recoveries, which is expected to help lower processing costs.

The Caravel project has indicated and inferred resources of 662 million tonnes at 0.28% for 1.86 million tonnes of the contained red metal.

It has excellent transport infrastructure, good community support, an available local workforce, access to low-cost grid power and access to two established ports at Geraldton and Bunbury.