Temporary Production Interruption At Mantoverde Operation

VANCOUVER – Capstone Copper Corp. reported that sulphide copper production is temporarily impacted due to a motor failure in the ball mill at the Mantoverde mine in Chile. The Mantoverde site experienced a failure of one of its two ball mill electrical drive motors. Over the next few days, the team on site replaced the damaged motor with the spare in order to return to full capacity. However, on August 30th, the site experienced a failure of the second ball mill drive motor. Without an additional spare on site, this has resulted in a period of impacted production at Mantoverde.
The Company estimates repairs to the ball mill motor will take approximately four weeks. During this period, it expects that Mantoverde will continue to operate at approximately half capacity through bypassing the ball mill, an operating mode for which the circuit is configured and that the team has successfully executed previously. An opportunity exists to further mitigate the effects of the interruption by rescheduling plant maintenance that had been planned for later in September to coincide with the ball mill downtime. Our team will continue to identify and execute mitigation plans, investigate the root cause of the motor failure, and advance a replacement and repair strategy to return to full capacity.
At this time, based on an estimated four-week repair schedule while it continues to operate at half capacity during that period, and expects production to be impacted by 3,000 to 4,000 tonnes of copper in concentrate at Mantoverde. Capstone plans to provide further updates in due course.