Flowsheet development for the Kamoa project – A case study

Ivanplats Ltd. appointed Xstrata Process Support to perform the flowsheeting development work for their hypogene and supergene geomet units of the Kamoa Copper deposit, located west of Kolwezi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Through appropriate use of Gy’s sampling and subsampling models, and systematic flowsheet development using modern Process Mineralogy, an optimised Milestone Flowsheet was developed, delivering a final concentrate grade of 32.8% Cu at 85.4% recovery with hypogene ore, and 45.1% Cu grade at a recovery of 83.4% for supergene ore. These results were obtained from representative samples of drill-core, quantitative mineralogy and high-confidence flotation testing. The significant value of this development is that a single flowsheet will treat both hypogene and supergene ores and produce treatable concentrates. Further work to advance the flowsheet performance beyond this milestone benchmark, and to perform variability testing for this resource, has been identified for investigation in the near future.