Skorpion’s production steady in 2017

Jo-Maré Duddy – Vedanta Zinc International’s wholly-owned Skorpion Zinc mine near Rosh Pinah in Namibia produced 84 000 tonnes of refined metal in its financial year ended March 2018, one percent less than the previous year.

Vedanta Zinc International (VZI), headquartered in Johannesburg, is a grouping of zinc assets located in South Africa, Namibia and Ireland, owned by India-based Vedanta Limited, a listed subsidiary of Vedanta Resources plc. Vedanta Resources is a London Stock Exchange listed, globally diversified natural resources company with interests in zinc, lead, silver, copper, iron ore, aluminium, power, as well as oil and gas.

Releasing its results yesterday, the company said a combination of the planned maintenance shutdown of the acid plant in the first quarter of the financial year under review, the early closure of Pit 103 for geotechnical reasons and blending challenges to make up the required plant feed grade impacted negatively on production at Skorpion.

Skorpion nevertheless contributed more than half of VZI’s consolidated production of 157 000 tonnes in its 2018 financial year, with Black Mountain Mining (BMM) in South Africa’s Northern Cape province delivering 72 000 tonnes.

VZI said the Pit 112 extension project at Skorpion is progressing well and is expected to be fully completed by the last quarter of the 2019 financial year. “This project has increased Skorpion's mine life by another 2.5 years and will contribute 250 000 tonnes of metal over this period,” it said.

“To execute Pit 112 and ensure no interruption in ore treatment, Skorpion Zinc restructured the business by outsourcing mining to a Tier I mining contractor. This also resulted in the successful secondment of some owner-employees into the contract,” VZI said.

Gamsberg

One of the company’s priorities this year will be the successful commencement of Gamsberg, part of BMM. “The Gamsberg project represents one of the largest zinc deposits in the world with reserves and resources of 215mt (16mt zinc) and the potential to ramp up to 600ktpa of zinc production,” VZI said.

The company is targeting first production by the middle of 2018, and has prioritised progress towards the ramp-up to Phase 1 production of 250 000 tonnes in its 2020 financial year. Phase 1 of the project only exploits a quarter of the full resource potential of Gamsberg, VZI said.

It is envisaged that at least a portion of Gamsberg’s zinc-in-concentrate production will be trucked to the Skorpion Zinc refinery in Namibia for refining, according to VZI’s website.

During a meeting with finance minister Calle Schlettwein in November 2014, Vedanda’s chief executive officer for Africa-based metals, Rajagopal Kishore Kumar, said the company approved US$782 million towards the conversion of the Skorpion Zinc refinery in Namibia and the development of the open-pit zinc mine in Gamsberg from 2015 to 2017. Of this, US$152 million (around N$1.9 billion at yesterday’s exchange rate) was earmarked for Skorpion to enable it to refine zinc sulphide concentrates from the Gamsberg mine into special high-grade zinc metal.

Deshnee Naidoo, chief executive officer of VZI, last year told Reuters that is investigating whether it could mine underground in Namibia when its open pit operations at Skorpion Zinc will be exhausted around 2020.

If Vedanta decides underground operations would not be viable, Naidoo said the company would convert the Skorpion refinery, whose current capacity is 150 000 tonnes per year, to treat different ores, meaning it could process third-party material, thereby maintaining a foothold in Namibia.

"We really do not want to leave Namibia," Naidoo said. – Additional reporting by Nampa/Reuters