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1) Arizona Sonoran Copper Company has entered into a strategic partnership with RIo Tinto where Rio is expected to hold 7.2% of the outstanding share capital of the company. Arizona Sonoran Copper Company owns Cactus mine located on private land in Arizona, which is a brownfield project currently not producing any copper. At Cactus, Rio Tinto plans to test and evaluate the potential commercial development of its Nuton copper heap leaching technology. The technology is promised to deliver increased copper recovery from mined ore and access new sources of copper such as low-grade sulphide resources, reprocessing of stockpiles and mineralized waste. As the push for the green transition heats up and copper is projected to be in high demand, and at the same time the process of opening up new mines is still very long, companies are looking for alternative sources to recover more metal. Mining giants are looking to recover more low-grade copper through bacteria, stockpile covers and different types of acids. “We see real opportunity in the Nuton portfolio of technologies to unlock new sources of copper — that may come from lower grade material in existing mines, or potentially material with complex mineralogy at new greenfield projects, or copper in mine waste,” Adam Burley, head of Rio's Nuton venture said.
2) In some exploration news, China is looking at drill a 10,000-meter (~33,000 ft.) deep hole in the Xinjiang region. The shaft will penetrate more than 10 continental layers of rock and reach rock that will be about 145 million years old, and it will take an estimated 457 days. “The construction difficulty of the drilling project can be compared to a big truck driving on two thin steel cables,” Sun Jinsheng, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told Xinhua. This will provide further data on the rock below our feet and even help assess the risks of environmental disasters such as volcano eruptions and earthquakes. The deepest man-made hole on Earth is still the Kola Superdeep Borehole located in Russia with a total depth of 40,230 ft or 12,262 meters that was reached in 1989 after 20 years of drilling.