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SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting now with Jan Nelson, CEO at Copper 360, which is listing on the market later this month. Jan, I appreciate the early morning time. Before we get to the mechanics of the whats and wheres around Copper 360, copper demand globally remains robust. As someone once said to me, you simply can’t argue with the periodic table – and that is what is going to drive copper.
JAN NELSON: Yes, that’s absolutely right. And if you look, the supply in the world is halving over the next 10 years. And if you look at the infrastructure development and EVs [electric vehicles], EVs are going to require by 2030, 42 million tonnes of copper, and supply will be only 10 million tonnes. So the fundamentals are in favour of a fairly robust copper price.
SIMON BROWN: Your operations that you’re looking at up in the Northern Cape … my sense around the Northern Cape, when I chat with old-school miners, is that there are literally hundreds of mines in that region, many of them perfectly viable in this day and age. Are you going back to old mines? Are you into exploration? Where are you in the process?
JAN NELSON: No, we’re not doing exploration. We’ve built one plant that’s currently producing copper plates from the reworking of old rock dumps that were left behind. So we’re rehabilitating and making copper.
But we are in the process of building three new processing plants and they will be targeting old mines that were developed by Newmont and Gold Fields with full data sets. So they’ve got all the development in place.
The ore bodies have been drilled out. In the copper slump of the 1990s and 2000s everybody moved away from the area, but we continued working [it]. So we are going back into those now and they are very good, predeveloped, and all the infrastructures are in place.
SIMON BROWN: That’s a great point because, as you said, this was solid work done by the likes of Gold Fields and others back in the nineties. You’re going in, and I’m imagining you’ve almost got a blueprint of exactly the how, what and where.
JAN NELSON: Yes, that’s it. I think the scale of the deposits is the right scale for a sort mid-tier junior company like ourselves, and probably too small for the likes of the big majors. But for us it fits perfectly. We are focusing on grade, not so much on volume, and so I think that’s why these deposits work out very well for us. As you said, we have the blueprint for mining and developing them.
SIMON BROWN: You mentioned that you’re already producing some. What is your sort of medium-term target in the amount that you would be looking to be able to sell?
JAN NELSON: Currently for the full year we will produce on an annualised basis about 1 200 tonnes of A-grade copper metal from our current plant, but in the next two years we are building that up to about 8 000 tonnes of copper metal with the three new processing plants that we’re building.
SIMON BROWN: In terms of logistics, I’m thinking we’ve seen updates from almost every company on the market. Rail, port and power are the huge challenges which folks are running into. I’m imagining those are a part of your thinking at this stage.
JAN NELSON: Absolutely. We work well with the municipality in the area. There have been periods where the municipality hasn’t load shedded us, but load shedding is a reality.
So we will in the next two months start construction of a 10 MVA solar plant that should be finished by the end of the year. That will help us in terms of the blackouts that we do have.
Our process is very reliant on electricity; it can’t stop. So that is a plant that we will start construction on.
SIMON BROWN: And are these fairly shallow mines where you are actually mining? Some of it, as you mentioned, is literally just rocks that were left behind. In terms of the mining is this fairly shallow?
JAN NELSON: Most of it is open-pit, and one or two of the deposits are very shallow underground, about 30 metres to 200 metres below the surface.
SIMON BROWN: Okay. That’s really shallow. Let’s move to the listing. You are currently unlisted, [and] looking to come to market later in February. Is this a private placement? Are you doing a capital raise?
JAN NELSON: We are doing a raise. The listing is scheduled for the end of February and we’re well on our way. We’ve completed most of the documents for the JSE on the AltX,
and we are raising about R260 million in terms of our capital expansion that will happen over the next two years – and we’ve secured most of that capital.
SIMON BROWN: Do you know your listing code? Do you have that data from the JSE yet?
JAN NELSON: No, not yet.
SIMON BROWN: Okay. We will wait for that because that’s the crunchy number. Copper 360 – we need to know what the alpha code will be on the JSE.
Jan Nelson, Copper 360 chief executive officer, I appreciate the early morning.
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