Century gears up for world’s top 5
THE company restarting the mothballed Century mine at Lawn Hill is ramping up to be one of the world’s biggest zinc producers with fly- in flyout operations based at Cairns.
New Century Resources has told the Australian Securities Exchange the restart is imminent after making strong progress in final refurbishment and commissioning since buying the operations from MMG just 18 months ago.
It says mining, processing and port operations teams are in place and that site activities have moved from day shift only to a 24- 7 schedule.
About 300 people are working at the mine site about 250km north of Mount Isa and its Gulf port of Karumba, although this is expected to fall to 200 when operations begin this month.
The company’s head of corporate affairs, Shane Goodwin, said about 150 people would be based at the mine site with just under another 50 at Karumba.
Mr Goodwin said it was good that many of its Karumba staff would be living in the Gulf town.
He said they would draw on its workforce from Mount Isa, Doo- madgee and Brisbane but that most would come from Townsville and Cairns.
Mr Goodwin said Townsville competed to be the fly- in fly- out base with strong representations from the council but that the city ultimately lost out to Cairns because of the arrangements with charter operator Alliance Airlines.
“At the end of the day it boiled down to fact that it was a higher cost of Townsville,” Mr Goodwin said.
He said the difference was not “huge” but that “every dollar counts”.
It is understood slot availability of aircraft was also a factor.
The Century group bought the mine from MMG in February 2017.
It has been upgrading the mine’s existing world- class infrastructure including large scale multi train flotation plant, 700- person camp, private airport, mining fleet, grid power connection, 304km slurry pipeline and port facility.
The company will extract metals in concentrate by reprocessing tailings and aim to achieve production of 264,000 tonnes a year of zinc and three million ounces of silver over seven years.
This would rank it the No. 5 zinc operation in the world, ahead of MMG’s new Dugald River mine.
It is looking to firm up more resources in the area to produce a further 560,000 tonnes of zinc, 433,000 tonnes of lead and almost 20 million ounces of silver.