The Yandera deposit is located approximately 95km southwest of the city of Madang, within the Bismark Mountain Range in Papua New Guinea (PNG), at elevations ranging from 1,500 to 2,400 m above mean sea level.
In August 2021, Freeport Resources announced that it had acquired all the outstanding share capital of Carpo Resources, which controls Era Resources, a corporation established under the laws of the Cayman Islands which controls the exploration license known as the Yandera Copper Project.
PNG’s Mining Resource Authority approved the renewal of the Yandera Project’s License EL 1335 through November 19, 2023.
The renewal of the EL 1335 License allows Freeport to commence work on a Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) to advance the project towards a Final Investment Decision (FID).
Based on the 2017 Independent Technical Report on the Yandera Project Pre-feasibility Study (PFS), the estimated life of mine is 20 years.
Yandera Project Location
The Yandera Copper Project is located 235km to the northwest of Lae, a port city in Papua New Guinea.
The License EL 1335 covers the 245.5 square kilometer (km2) tenement comprising Freeport Resources’ fully-owned Yandera Copper Project.
The Yandera project has been designated as a project of strategic national interest in PNG and can potentially become one of the country’s most significant copper mines.
Geology and Mineralisation
Yandera is an igneous, intrusive hosted, structurally controlled copper porphyry system with ancillary molybdenum and gold composed of a series of adjacent, vertically oriented deposits along recognised structural trends.
Mineralisation at the project is concentrated in several deposits including Imbruminda, Gremi, Omora, Gamagu and Dimbi.
Imbruminda, Gremi, and Omora deposits are contiguous and separated from the Dimbi deposits by a low-grade, central, silica-rich zone, which is bounded on three sides by high-angle faults.
Yandera Project Reserves
Based on the Preliminary Feasibility Study, with an effective date of November 2017, the Yandera project includes total resources of 959 million tonnes of copper equivalent grading 0.37% including measured and indicated resources of 728 million tonnes grading 0.39% copper equivalent, and 541 million tonnes of Probable Reserves averaging 0.39% copper equivalent.
The measured and indicated resources equate to 6.2 billion pounds of copper equivalent and total resources equate to almost 8 billion pounds of copper equivalent.
Mining and Ore Processing
Conventional open-pit mining methods consisting of drilling, blasting, loading and hauling will be employed at the Yandera mine. Contractor mining was determined to be more viable compared to owner-operated fleets during the financial analysis of the PFS.
Metal recovery of sulfide mineralisation of copper (Cu), Gold (Au), and Molybdenum (Mo) would be by conventional crushing, grinding, and flotation to produce a Cu-Au concentrate and separate Mo concentrate.
Blasted material will be loaded using Komatsu P&H4100 electric rope shovels. The shovels will load the material into Belaz 75602 diesel-electric dump trucks which will haul ore to the primary crusher location or ore stockpiles and waste to the waste rock dump.
The flowsheet selected for processing ore at Yandera is a conventional concentrator comprising milling and flotation to produce two concentrate streams, a copper concentrate and a molybdenum disulphide concentrate.
The project’s major unit operations include Crushing, SAG and Ball milling, slurry dewatering, Bulk rougher and scavenger flotation, copper concentrate regrind ahead of two-stage cleaning and a cleaner scavenger circuit, molybdenum disulphide rougher circuit, seven stage molybdenum disulphide cleaner circuit, concentrate dewatering and filtration/ drying, and tailings dewatering.
Infrastructure
Freeport uses Madang City as its logistical base of operations. Water required for project operations is taken from rainfall runoff and groundwater.
Power required for the camp facilities is provided by a diesel-powered generator.
Contractors Involved
SRK Consulting was engaged to complete the independent technical report on the Yandera Project Pre-feasibility Study.
