@Mutley8 ............
"Remember when you posted their tailings are 0.16%......that 0.16% is the leftovers in the material “after processing” not worth bothering with after most of the cobalt has been extracted!! Jaw dropping aye"
That is not entirely accurate. The KITD is part of the resource that Katanga Mining have, they are 'old' tailings for lack of a better description, but have certainly not been through their modern mill.
This from p74 of the Katanga Mining Technical paper....
"For the initial KITD (2014 – 2015) drilling campaign, a portable powered auger was used for the drilling and sample extraction. The 50 mm nominal bore drill rod produces approximately 2 to 3 kg of sample per meter drilled. Samples were drawn in 0.5 m increments until the drilling was terminated upon reaching the red soil (terre rouge) base. All samples were placed in durable, sequentially numbered clean sample plastic bags (polyethylene plastic - high strength bags of 150µ, size 250 mm x 400 mm in size) and taken by vehicle to the Geology Intervention Building. If a sample was particularly wet, the original sample bag was double bagged to prevent any sample loss. Once samples were logged and analysed, the information was entered into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet by the drilling contractor. The assay database was sent to KCC on 25 August 2016. The lithology database was not forthcoming from the Contractor but given that all sampling took place within the tailings itself, a rock code of TAILINGS was assigned by KCC. This information was imported into the geological database (GDMS Fusion v.9) for permanent storage."
http://www.katangamining.com/~/medi...tsoperational/technical-report-march-2018.pdf
KITD tailings are 7.8M tonnes of 1.49% Cu and 0.16% Co. It is part of their overall measured and indicated resources (There is 12,500 tonnes of cobalt in these tailings). Katanga are mining these tailings via hydraulic mining as they are easy to mine and close to surface.
Again why would they bother mining 0.16% cobalt if 1-3% were just lying around in everyone's backyard??
WFE itself on 23/7 announcement mentioned (p7) the potential acquisition of 'cobalt tailings' for feeding the new plant, so hence why the cobalt in the tailings resource of Katanga Mining is very relevant.
It would be nice to get some assays from these potential 'acquisitions'.
In the first 6 months of 2018 Katanga milled a total of 3,595,014 tonnes at the 'Kamoto' concentrator. This consisted of 1,628,751 of the KITD 'tailings' with a copper grade of 1.56% Cu and 0.17% of Co. There were also 1,923,493 tonnes of open pit ore copper grade 3.74% Cu and 0.48% Co.
(p11) from
http://www.katangamining.com/~/medi...2-2018-management-discussion-and-analysis.pdf
Other cobalt and copper came from Luila Metallurgical plant where the oxide ore feed was 3.88% Cu and 0.47% Co.
So no in answer to your statements about just including the high grade ore, it seems that Katanga are mining and including ore pretty much along the lines of their mineral resources.
There is an absolute plethora of information available about copper and cobalt in the DRC on the Katanga Minings web pages..... main page
http://www.katangamining.com/