CHILE The board of Vancouver-based AMERIGO RESOURCES has approved construction of a molybdenum plant to complement its copper plant near Santiago. The tailings retreatment project is run by MINERA VALLE CENTRAL (MVC), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amerigo.
MVC treats fresh tailings from the El Teniente mine and in situ tails from the Colihues mine, recovering an average of 13,000 tonnes of copper as concentrate containing 29.8% Cu and 0.894% Mo yearly. The addition of a US$2.1-million moly plant would recover about 700,000 lb of molybdenum annually in the form of MoS2. Amerigo believes the operating costs would be about US$2/lb of molybdenum.
The MVC plant has just completed Phase 1 of expansion to 16,000 tonnes of refined copper annually. This included additional classifiers and flotation equipment. Phase 2 is being planned to raise production to 20,000 tonnes/year of copper by adding additional grinding capacity of the coarse fraction at a capital cost of US$2.5 million.
Amerigo has made available both a summary and complete technical report of its MVC operation at www.AmerigoResources.com under the Projects section.
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