Kamoa-Kakula Copper
Digging Deep: Why the Kamoa-Kakula Copper Project is Different The Kamoa-Kakula Copper Project has seen remarkable growth since it first extracted copper in May last year.
T
he Project extracted almost 20 tonnes worth of the metal between December and January. In February, it was announced that production capacity would be expanded – allowing the plant to bring more than 9 million tonnes of copper ore out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) mineral-rich earth. However, while the Project’s impressive growth over the last 12 months is notable, its story starts many years in the past. The Kamoa-Kakula Copper Project is vast, covering almost 400 square kilometres in the Congolese Copperbelt just north of the DRC’s
southern border with Zambia. Canadian mining company Ivanhoe mines started prospecting in the area way back in 1998 but had to wait ten agonising years to find the stratiform copper mineralisation it was looking for. To find out why the Project had to wait so long to strike copper, despite its prime position in the Congolese Copperbelt, we have to go back even further. Copper deposits were first formed in the area some 500 million years ago, during the Cambrian period when Earth was a very different place. Most of the continents, for example, were found in the southern hemisphere and an evolutionary explosion produced an incredible amount of animal biodiversity that, despite still existing underwater, would serve as the forbears to most of the living creatures today – including humans.
Business Enquirer Magazine · Issue 106
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