Jubilee extracts gold in Zambia in environmentally safe way
Vital to Jubilee’s strategy is its commitment to ensuring that there is a significant reduction in the environmental hazard and waste left behind from centuries of mining activity, and Zambia is a focal point of concern relating to this mine waste exposure.
Using Jubilee’s proprietary knowledge and expertise in physical and chemical processing this clean-up can be incentivised by extracting the metals contained at attractive cash margins, before re-depositing the tailings in an environmentally secure tailings facility, minimising the future impact.
In August 2019, Jubilee established its first fully integrated multi-metal recovery and refining operational footprint in Zambia with the acquisition of the multi-metal Sable Refinery, adjacent to the Company’s Kabwe tailings resource, marking a significant milestone in the Company’s international roll-out strategy, as well as widening its commodity exposure.
The acquisition served as an entry point for Jubilee into Zambia, presenting the Company with a very well-placed platform from which to pursue the various base metal opportunities presented by the country and to begin actively engaging with third party suppliers to develop strategic partnerships as part of the expansion of the Integrated Kabwe Operations.
The Board and management see a significant opportunity to expand operations in the country, particularly in copper, where there is a large supply of on-surface waste material. Jubilee’s implementation of its copper strategy is centred around its in-house proven ability to pre-concentrate and extract value from tailings resources.
The systematic implementation of the strategy includes; the commissioning of the copper refinery circuit; processing tails owned by Sable Refinery to produce copper cathode; entering into third party ore supply offtake agreements; securing exclusive access to vast surface copper tailings resources.
Jubilee is in addition working with the Zambian authorities, reviewing further copper tailings in the Country which the Company expects will create a number of opportunities for further expansion of operations in Zambia.
The Company’s highly experienced technical and operational teams plan to construct a copper concentrator at the tailings resource to produce two separate concentrates for both the acid soluble copper oxides and the sulphide associated copper. This facility enables the Project to process copper tailings previously regarded as uneconomical.
