Atlas Consolidated Mining and Development Corp. said it had successfully made headway in the commissioning of equipment for the expansion of its subsidiary’s copper processing plant in Cebu.
In a statement, the company said subsidiary Carmen Copper Corp. ran continuously for about 60 hours half of a newly installed process circuit for the expansion of a mill.
The expansion project is expected to be completed in March and bring the mill’s capacity to 60,000 tons per day (tpd) from 40,000 tpd currently.
“(The initial success gives) high confidence in the equipment performance and proof of process of the expanded plant,” Atlas said.
“While this is still part of the equipment and process commissioning exercise, the data gathered showed satisfactory copper recovery and grind size accuracy,” the company added.
Further, Atlas Mining said commissioning work on the remaining half of the process circuit would start soon.
Other major components installed for the mill’s expansion were two ball mills, four rougher flotation tanks and an auxiliary line for primary crushing.
The auxiliary line will add 30,000 tpd crushing capacity to the existing line’s 50,000 tpd.
In November, Atlas Mining said the decline in its net income narrowed to 20 percent year-on-year after nine months of operations in 2013.
This was much better than the 52-percent drop in profit recorded in the first semester.
During the first three quarters of 2013, Carmen Copper saw a 3-percent year-on-year rise in output to 68.86 million pounds of copper concentrate.
Likewise, gold output increased by 50 percent to 15,188 ounces as process improvements pushed up mill throughput by 5 percent to reach a daily average of 43,462 tons of ore.
As of September, copper prices averaged $3.32 per pound while gold prices averaged $1,431 an ounce.