Vizcachitas Project — 2022 Technical Report

Executive Summary

The Vizcachitas processing plant is designed for a capacity of 136,000 tpd and is located in two areas within the Rocín River valley. The crushing and grinding circuits are situated on a platform of compacted waste rock obtained from pre-stripping operations, while the concentrator and filtration plant area is located on a natural plateau next to the access road. The plant is designed to recover copper and molybdenum from sulphide ore through a comprehensive flotation circuit.

The process flowsheet includes a primary crusher (Metso MK60-110E), secondary cone crushers, and a tertiary crushing circuit utilizing two HRC3000 high pressure grinding roll (HPGR) crushers. The undersize from the crushing plant is fed to two 23 MW ball mills arranged in a reverse closed circuit with hydrocyclones to achieve a P80 of 240 µm. The flotation circuit consists of Cu-Mo bulk flotation and Cu-Mo selective flotation stages using mechanical agitated tanks and column cells.

Tailings management involves a dry stack filtered tailings deposit. The tailings from flotation are classified, with the coarse fraction fed to belt filters and the fine fraction thickened and filtered in pressure filters. The filtered cake contains an average moisture of 15% and is disposed of in layers co-mingled with mine waste rock. The plant design is supported by bench-scale and pilot plant testwork, with fresh water consumption estimated at 271 L/s and power consumption at 16.6 kWh/t.

Reports

Website: https://losandescopper.com/projects/overview/

Report Date: 2022

Region: Rocín River Valley, Chile

Project Status: Development (PFS)

Commodity: Copper, Molybdenum

Throughput: 136,000 tpd

Mine Life: 

Mine Type: 

Ore type: