Vancouver — Atna Resources (ATN-T) has inked a deal with Teck Cominco (TEK-T) paving the way for the junior to acquire the Celeste project in northern Chile.
The 29-sq-km project surrounds Atna’s Cerro Negro copper deposit, which hosts an inferred, open pit, oxide resource of 191 million tonnes grading 0.46% copper as estimated by Phelps Dodge (PD-N). Previous work by Cominco identified a 900-by-400-metre area of sulphide mineralization dubbed the La Estrella zone. Located along strike with the Cerro Negro deposit, the zone returned values of up to 151 metres grading 0.84% copper and 0.13 grams gold per tonne in drilling.
Teck Cominco will retain a 2% net smelter royalty and Atna must pay a one-time payment of US$50 per hectare land usage fee for any ground used for mining facilities.
Atna picked up the large Cerro Negro copper-oxide deposit earlier this year from a Chilean subsidiary of Phelps Dodge (PD-N). The deal calls for Atna to make escalating payments totalling $750,000 to Phelps over five years. Also, the company must pay Chilean state-owned Enami $6 million and spend $2.5 million on the property during the five years.
Cerro Negro is 50 km northeast of the port city of Chanaral, at an elevation of 1,100 metres. The project is part of a 7-km-long belt of tightly clustered iron oxide copper-gold breccia pipes and associated manto deposits. High-grade copper has been mined from the area by artisan miners since the early 1900s and continues today, with a few miners producing a small tonnage of oxide ore grading 3-5% copper.
By focusing exploration on already-identified higher-grade areas, Atna believes it can define an oxide resource of more than 40 million tonnes grading in excess of 0.8%. Such a resource would support a solvent extraction-electrowinning (SX-EW) plant capable of producing 25,000 tonnes of copper cathode annually, with potential to increase as additional reserves are proved up.
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