Excelsior completes pipeline construction at $807mn Gunnison project

Excelsior Mining has confirmed the construction of a two-mile high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipeline corridor at the Gunnison Copper Project in southern Arizona. 

Connecting the Johnson Camp Mine (JCM) processing facility to the production wellfield began in January and has been successfully completed precisely as per Excelsior's construction timeline. Excelsior remains on-schedule for first copper production in Q4 2019.

"Another critical construction milestone has been successfully completed;" commented Stephen Twyerould, Excelsior’s CEO & President, "We are now more than 90% finished in terms of the entire construction process, and we look forward to completing the remaining elements over the next month."

Construction of the pipeline corridor included the installation of a bridge over an area of the property where elevation is required, and a 460ft tunnel under the I-10 highway. The pipeline corridor contains 18" and 20" diameter PLS and raffinate lines, as well as a freshwater line and a utility line.

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Excelsior's North Star deposit contains a measured and indicated copper resource of 4.99 billion pounds (873 million tons grading 0.29%). The North Star deposit is located immediately adjacent to JCM, which Excelsior purchased out of receivership in 2015 for $8.4mn. The mine is expected to produce 2.2 billion pounds of pure copper cathode over its 24-year lifespan.

The Gunnison Copper Project in Cochise County, Arizona is an advanced staged, low cost, environmentally friendly in-situ recovery copper extraction project that is fully-permitted to 125 million pounds per year of copper cathode production. The feasibility study projected an after-tax NPV of $807mn and an IRR of 40% using a $2.75 per pound copper price and a 7.5% discount rate.

Excelsior's technical work on the Gunnison Copper Project is supervised by Stephen Twyerould, a Fellow of AUSIMM (Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy).