Carmen Copper allots P6 B for new facilities
Carmen Copper Corp., a wholly owned unit of listed Atlas Consolidated Mining and Development Corp., is spending over P6 billion to put up ore sorting and crushing facilities in its Toledo Copper Mine in Cebu.
In a filing with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources-Environmental Management Bureau (DENR-EMB), Carmen Copper is applying for a new environmental compliance certificate (ECC) to integrate all its existing ECCs with its new applications for the proposed upgrading of the Carmen Concentrator (Carcon) facility and modification of its airstrip site waste rock dump (WRD) facility.
The company has estimated the introduction of new facilities in the Carcon Facility and the airstrip site WRD facility to cost P6.34 billion.
Of the total cost, the airstrip WRD modifications comprises 96.5 percent.
Carmen Copper said it would establish a new ore sorting plant that would be integrated into the existing process-operations of the Carcon facility.
The Carcon ore processing facility has been in operations since Atlas started operating the Atlas Mines. The said mining operations was suspended for some period of time and went back in operations in 2005-2006.
Meanwhile, Carmen Copper is proposing to modify the Airstrip WRD by cancelling the Ilag area and expanding on the other side, as well as put up a waste rock processing facility for use as a construction material.
For the modification of the airstrip WRD facility, the mining firm is introducing a crushing facility within the area to process the waste rocks and turn it into aggregate commodities.
The crushing facility will help reduce “the volume of waste rock stored in the landfill,” as well as reduce “the total landfill area as there are portions that will not anymore be included/utilized for WRD.”
From January to June, Carmen Copper registered a six percent decline in copper metal production to 36.58 million pounds from 38.73 million pounds a year ago.
The decline was attributed to lower tonnage milled, which decreased by six percent to 8.66 million tons in the first half from 9.26 million tons in the same period last year.