Copper -gold Tuvalu discovery and Panguna Copper- Gold Mine Very recently, Lion announced the discovery of a very deep Copper-gold porphyry just 1 km NE of Tuvatu gold mine.
This could be much larger than the potential of Tuvatu gold, as big as that may be .
For comparison , I provide below the nearby Panguna Copper- Gold porphyry mine whose grades are near identical to that contained in the assays of the Lion discovery .
These porphyries contain huge amounts of copper and gold and can sustain mining for decades.
Panguna is an example ..
Panguna in PNG
The original pre-mining ore reserve in 1969 was - 994 Mt @ 0.48% Cu, 0.56 g/t Au, 3 g/t Ag (Clark, 1990).
Production between 1969 and 1989 amounted to 710 Mt of ore @ 0.53% Cu, 0.63 g/t Au for 3 Mt of contained Cu metal, 306 tonnes of gold and 784 tonnes of silver
(Clark, 1990, Bougainville Copper Ltd., Annual Report, 1992), plus 630 Mt of waste (Bougainville Copper Ltd., Annual Report, 1999).
Remaining reserves in 1999 were officially listed at 496 Mt @ 0.45% Cu, 0.55 g/t Au.
In addition, mineralisation amenable to upgrading by screening would add a further 520 Mt @ 0.22% Cu, 0.18 g/t Au to the reserves to produce a mill feed of 195 Mt @ 0.34% Cu, 0.28 g/t Au.
This would result in a total combined mill feed from both remaining ore groups of 691 Mt @ 0.40% Cu, 0.47 g/t Au (Bougainville Copper Ltd., Annual Report, 1999).
Remaining Mineral Resources (Bougainville Copper Limited release to the ASX, March 2016) were:
Indicated Resource - 1.538 Gt @ 0.3% Cu, 0.33 g/t Au,
Inferred Resource - 300 Mt @ 0.3% Cu, 0.4 g/t Au,
TOTAL Resource - 1.838 Gt @ 0.3% Cu, 0.34 g/t Au.( 50 m ounces )
Panguna was shut down in 1989 by the military ...it is now reopening