Ormonde’s 90% owned Barruecopardo Tungsten Project in western Spain is one of the premier undeveloped tungsten projects in the world outside of China:

• Large & High Grade - 10.9 Mt grading 0.45% WO₃ (tungsten trioxide) in the Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resource categories (JORC-compliant)

• Deposit open along strike and at depth – likely long life mine

• Low capital cost - €20-25M

• Forecasted operating cost in the lower end of western world costs

• Initial production rate 400,000 tonnes per year, to produce 130,000-150,000 metric tonne units (mtu) of WO₃ per year (this equates to 1,000-1,200 tonnes of tungsten metal)

• Planned post start-up increases in production to 600,000 to 800,000tpy would increase tungsten production to 200,000 to 300,000 mtu WO₃ per year, positioning Barruecopardo as one of the few very large World tungsten producers

• 80% recovery to a 65% WO₃ (industry standard) scheelite concentrate using simple gravity processing.  Premium grade 77.8% achievable while maintaining overall recovery

• Low cost gravity processing due to coarse grained mineralisation

• Well serviced and politically stable location

• Late 2012 production target

Find out more About Tungsten.

Location & Mineralisation

Barruecopardo is located in the Salamanca Province of the Castilla y Leon Region in North West Spain. The Project is a brownfield site as the deposit was previously worked to shallow depths by a series of small open pit workings (30m depth)and one larger open pit (80m depth), from the early 1900s until 1982.

Previous operations produced a clean, high grade, tungsten concentrate which was sold to tungsten metal processors. Tungsten mineralisation occurs in quartz veins dominantly as coarse grained scheelite, with minor to trace wolframite, which form part of a major granite-hosted sheeted vein system.

Barruecopardo is a steeply dipping, multiple zone mineralised system with a strike length of over 1.6km. The deposit is open at depth, with drilling having tested only the top 150-250m. Drilling has intersected broad zones of high grade tungsten including:

• 27.5m @ 1.2% WO₃
• 11.8m @ 0.9% WO₃

Mineral Resource

The current JORC resource estimate (prepared by CSA Global, May'10) presently stands at 10.9 Mt grading 0.45% WO₃ using a 0.25% cut-off grade equating to 4.9 million metric tonne units (mtus) or 49,000 tonnes of contained WO₃. Of this total, of 6.5 million tonnes grading 0.46% WO₃ (equating to 3.0 million mtus or 30,000 tonnes of contained WO₃) is in the Indicated Resource category, with an additional Inferred Resource of 4.4 million tonnes grading 0.44% WO₃ (equating to a further 1.9 million mtus or 19,000 tonnes of contained WO₃).

The resource is presently drilled to an average depth of 200m and is completely open at depth along its presently defined 1.6km strike length, drilling to date yielding 5Mt per 100m of vertical depth. As such it is expected that the resource will expand considerably when deeper drilling is eventually initiated; a long life mining operation is anticipated. 

Mining

Largely mechanised; current plans would see initial production facilitated by:

• steeply dipping deposit & regular geometry
• competent ground conditions.

Initial production rate 400,000 tpa, to produce 130,000 metric tonne units of WO₃ per year (1,000 tonnes of Tungsten metal), with planned post start-up increases in production to 600,000 to 800,000tpy increasing tungsten production to 200,000 to 300,000 mtu WO3 per year, and positioning Barruecopardo as one of the few very large World tungsten producers.

Mineral Processing

Mineralisation is very coarse and is amenable to low cost gravity concentration.
Testwork shows 80% recovery to a 65% WO3 scheelite concentrate.  A premium grade concentrateof 77.8% is achievable while maintaining overall recovery:

• gravity concentration of coarse minerals by jigs and spirals
• clean-up of all gravity concentrates.

Costs

Indicative Capital Cost: €20-25M
Indicative Cash Operating Cost: €80/mtu

Development Plans 2010/2012

• Permitting of brownfields site
• Completion of infill drilling, engineering design and other feasibility studies
• Finalise capital funding/off-take agreements
• Construction & production by late 2012

 

Other Benefits

• Excellent road infrastructure directly to site
• Strong local stakeholder support
• Opportunity to access government grants toward capital investment.
  

You can download the Barruecopardo Tungsten Project brochure by clicking here

Location: Salamanca Province, Castilla y Leon Region, Western Spain, approximately 70km west of the city of Salamanca and 350 km west-north west of Madrid.  The nearest town is Vitigudino.

Ownership: Ormonde has earned a 90% interest in various investigation permits in Salamanca Province, totalling some 272 square kilometers, through a joint venture with Siemcalsa (10%), a regional, partially state-funded company. These permits are held by Saloro S.L., a wholly-owned Ormonde subsidiary. The permits are issued for an initial period of 3 years, renewable for further periods of 3 years upon submission of work programmes to the regional authority, the Junta de Castilla y Leon.

Current Status: Drilling for optimisation of initial mining blocks commencing in Q3 2010; mining studies underway; environmental studies for permitting underway and initial permitting documentation being finalised for submission.

Latest news: 27th May 2010 - Doubling and Major Upgrade in Mineral Resource (Pdf)

Ormonde is evaluating a previously mined tungsten deposit in the Salamanca area of western Spain (Fig-1A and B).  The mineralisation is contained within the Barruecopardo (Bar..wec..o..par..do) Vein System (Fig-2). To date, a total of 56 diamond drill holes have been drilled by Ormonde in the Barruecopardo System (total of 11,000m) and this work has defined a 1,600m long by 300m wide mineralised system, containing at least 5, high grade, steeply dipping, zones of sheeted veins within granite rocks (Fig-3).

The mineralisation is coarse grained and metallurgical testwork yields high recoveries in a gravity circuit. The mineralisation is visibly distinctive and contained in competent granite rocks.  Following work programmes comprising two stages of drilling resulting in the definition of the high-grade tungsten mineralisation, and initial metallurgical testwork programmes, the Barruecopardo project was upgraded to advanced project status in July 2007. A subsequent Order-of-Magnitude technical-economic study completed in January 2008  focused on a 200,000 tonne per year underground operation and indicated that the deposit had the potential to become a relatively simple, high-margin, mining operation, utilising low cost gravity concentration processing. This study indicated modest capital costs and robust economics.

A programme of infill drilling over the thick lenses of mineralisation within the Filon Principal Zone was carried out between August and October 2008 to facilitate mine design work. Results from this drilling exceeded expectations, with high tungsten grades intersected over significant widths.  These results indicated that lower cost, bulk, mechanised mining methods are applicable over this portion of the deposit and this would sustain a higher production rate. This has led to the decision to adopt a 400,000 tonnes per year production rate for the completion of technical studies on the Project.

A second vein system, termed Valdegallegos, is located immediately to the west of Barruecopardo.  Small mine production workings in this area indicate the potential of this system. To date little exploration has been carried out on the Valdegallegos System, although of the two holes drilled into this system by Ormonde one returned high grade tungsten mineralisation.

The 5 main zones within Barruecopardo System, as depicted in the plan, are from east to west:

• Filon Abilio
• Filon Principal
• Filon Central
• Filon Maestro
• Filon Oeste

• Fig-1A Castilla y Leon Region
• Fig-1B Salamanca Province
• Fig-2A Plan showing Tungsten Mineralised Zones
• Fig-2B Overview plan of the main tungsten mineralised zones at Barruecopardo
• Fig-3A Cross Sections through Barruecopardo
• Fig-3B Cross Sections through Barruecopardo
• Fig-3C Cross Sections through Barruecopardo

Salamanca is an area of substantial historic tungsten production and Barruecopardo was, until the early 1980s, the largest tungsten mine in Spain, producing a high quality tungsten concentrate from open-pit mining.  The original mining at Barruecopardo was via a series of small, up to 200m long, by typically 30m wide, very steep sided, largely non-mechanised, open pit workings. These mine workings were largely located on the northern end of the Filon Maestro Zone and the main southern portion of the Filon Principal Zone, but with some workings on Filon Abilio, Filon Central, Filon Oeste and on the Valdegallegos veins. These surface operations were advanced downwards to depths of up to 30m, as depicted in the photo below.

More recent mining, from the 1960s up until 1982, concentrated on developing the small open pit workings on the Filon Principal Zone into a larger, 800m long by 100m wide, open pit (the Main Pit) which was accessed via a ramp and mined down to a maximum depth of 80m (Fig-5). The pit walls were semi-vertical and intermediate safety berms were not in general cut into these walls.  All material mined in the Main Pit was crushed in-pit (Fig-6), transported to surface by a conveyor located in an underground gallery and all material (both ore and waste) was processed through the gravity plant.  Figure-7 shows an oblique aerial view of the Main Pit, processing plant, mine offices and tailings dumps. The vertical pit walls, lack of safety berms, the unselective mining method and the material handling arrangements, all eventually created mining and economic issues which eventually forced a cessation of mining activities in 1982.  Figure-8 shows the presently flooded Main Pit.

• Fig-4 Small Open Pit Workings
• Fig-5 Main Open Pit, circa 1980
• Fig-6 Crusher Station dump point in Main Pit
• Fig-7 Oblique Aerial Photo circa 1980
• Fig-8 Main Open Pit 2008, looking south
• Fig-9 Aerial Photograph Plan View showing old mine workings and Ormonde drillholes

Drilling: Ormonde is the first company to carry out systematic drilling at Barruecopardo. Drilling to-date of 56 diamond drillholes has established the presence of 5 steeply-dipping zones within a mineralised system at least 1,600 metres  long, which is open to the north and south. All zones are also open at depth, with the current drilling having established continuity of the mineralisation to circa 250 metres depth.  Figure-9 shows the drillhole layout superimposed on an aerial photograph showing the old open pits.

Geology: The work carried out by Ormonde has established that the tungsten mineralisation occurs dominantly in narrow quartz veins (Fig-10) as coarse grained scheelite, with minor to trace wolframite, which form part of a major granite-hosted sheeted vein system. The veins, usually less than 40mm in thickness, but with considerable strike and dip continuity, contain minor quantities of sulphides, generally have a NNE strike and dip steeply to the east. The very coarse nature of the mineralisation (Fig-11, 12) indicates a strong nugget effect and necessitates application of an upper cut-off for resource estimation.

Resource: In May 2010, CSA Global (Australia) prepared a JORC-compliant mineral resource estimate based upon all holes drilled in the deposit and the full XRF tungsten assay database. 
CSA has classified the Mineral Resources in the Indicated and Inferred categories, and has reported the Mineral Resource at a cut-off of 0.25% WO3 as follows:

Category	Tonnes (millions)	Grade (WO3%)	Contained WO3 (mtu*)
Indicated	6.50	0.46	3.0 million
Inferred	4.38	0.44	1.9 million
Total	10.88	0.45	4.9 million

* mtu = metric tonne unit, the standard unit for measurement  and trading of tungsten, which is equivalent to 10 kg of WO3.  1.8 million mtu is equivalent to 18,000 tonnes.

Mining will be at various cut-off grades for different mining methods and the operation will mine to various head grades, depending on prevailing market conditions and the chosen mix of bulk versus selective mining methods.

The Mineral Resource has been modelled to depths of 230 metres below the ground surface.  Drilling has shown that all resource zones over the 1.6 kilometre strike length of the deposit continue at depth, highlighting further significant resource potential at depth..

The current resource equates to a tonnage distribution of some 5 million tonnes for every 100 metres of depth of the deposit.  As the mineralisation remains open at depth along its full currently known 1.6 kilometre strike length, the Company believes that there is considerable scope for very significant increases to this resource in the future.

Infill drilling on Filon Principal: An 11 hole, 2,500 metre infill drilling programme was carried out to infill the widely spaced drillholes in the thicker, multiple lens area of tungsten mineralisation within the Filon Principal Zone. This zone will largely dictate the production rate at Barruecopardo, as it contains a significant proportion of the resource and its thickness makes it suitable for bulk mining methods. The FP Zone (Fig-3, 13, 14) is now known to comprise

• a 1,000m long high-grade P1a lenses which averages 8m true thickness over the central 475m section
• a 600m long medium grade P2 lens, which contains a 200m long section averaging 8m true thickness
• a 600m long medium grade P3 lens which contains a 200m long section averaging 9m true thickness

Metallurgy and Processing: Testwork has indicated that the coarse-grained tungsten minerals (Fig-11, 12) may be concentrated effectively, following crushing to 3mm, to yield up to 85-90% recoveries to a gravity pre-concentrate.  Results from a large sample composited from the Filon Principal and Filon Central Zones show that 78.4% of the contained tungsten can be recovered to a final cleaned scheelite concentrate at the industry standard grade of 65% WO₃.   The most recent phase of testwork involved upgrading of a pre-concentrate produced during earlier stages of testwork in a revised cleaning circuit, and shows that a maximum open circuit recovery of 77% of the contained tungsten could be recovered to a premium grade 77.8% WO₃ concentrate. These recoveries are for 'open-circuit' testwork. Given the additional recovery that would be realised through recirculation in an industrial application these recoveries could be expected to increase.

The capital and operating cost of the processing plant would be minimised by the ability to avoid the necessity for any primary grinding. This coarse liberation size will also avoid the necessity to construct a slimes dam.  The mass-pull will be in the 1% region, resulting in the need for a small concentrate clean-up circuit. High recoveries of around 80% to a final cleaned concentrate are anticipated.  The work to date has indicated that the process plant would consist of:

• 3-stage crushing to 3mm
• Gravity concentration of minus 3mm ore in Jigs operating in rougher-scavenger-cleaner circuit
• Gravity concentration of the minus 1mm ore in spirals configured in a rougher-scavenger-cleaner circuit
• Grind of pre-concentrate to 300-800 micron
• Clean-up of the pre-concentrates on tables
• Final clean-up circuit using combination of flotation and/or electrostatics and/or electromagnetics
• to yield a saleable WO₃ concentrate
  

Mining: The mineralised zones of economic interest occasionally occur as individual vein structures, which may vary from 1m true thickness (Fig-4) up to 3m, as in Filon Maestro, but more usually as veins swarms, which may vary up to 40m in thickness (Fig-10), Mining would largely be by mechanised bulk mining methods, with a minor amount of more selective mining being employed in some of the narrow very high grade areas.

It is envisaged that the following mining methods would be employed:

• Mechanised bulk open-stoping in the thicker areas of the FP Zone
• Mechanised longhole-stoping with minimum 2.0m mining widths in the narrower zones and areas of single vein structures
• Shrinkage-stoping in very narrow high grade areas, with mechanised extraction

The salient features of the proposed underground mining operation would be:

• Access to mine via 2 to 3 declines collared in the old surface pits, with trucking of uncrushed ore to surface
• Initial production at 400,000 t per year, possibly increasing thereafter
• Mining facilitated by
            o Visually distinctive ore zones as a result of the coarse fluorescent scheelite
            o Steep dips and good continuity of mineralised zones
            o Good ground conditions in competent granite
            o Tight, relatively impermeable rocks for a relatively dry mine
            o Flexibility to vary the mix of mining methods to achieve a range of mill feed grades, if necessary
• On-going resource exploration at depth facilitated by positioning exploration drives in ore zones to drill adjacent zones
• Exploration along strike by surface drilling north and south and at Valdegallegos

Evaluation: The project is currently at pre-feasibility stage.  Based on the current resource estimations, preliminary metallurgical testwork, and utilising industry capital cost comparisons prior to any engineering design work, it is anticipated that a 65 tonne per day operation (circa 400,000t pa) would cost in the region of €20-25 million and display robust economics.  The bulk mechanised mining and simple gravity style process circuit required will ensure that Barruecopardo is a low capital cost project.

Ormonde's priorities are now on completing feasibility study work on a tungsten operation based on a resource/reserve suitable to support an initial 10 year mine life, although it is anticipated that the deposit is likely to support a much longer life operation.  This work includes definitive metallurgical testwork to establish the optimum pre-concentrate clean-up circuit and facilitate the design and costing of a process plant. Environmental base-line studies have also been initiated as part of the permitting process for a mining operation.  The current schedule would see Barruecopardo in production by late 2012.

Valdegallegos Prospect: A separate tungsten system is located one kilometre to the west of Barruecopardo, the Valdegallegos Prospect, Fig 2 and 9. There are a number of old mine workings on the various veins within this system, Fig 15. One of two holes drilled into Valdegallegos yielded a high-grade intersection of 0.9m @ 2.7% WO₃. The drilling to date has been focussed on the Barruecopardo System, but follow-up drilling is planned for the Valdegallegos Prospect.

• Fig-10 Vein Swarm at Filon Maestro on west wall
• Fig-11 Dark material is wolframite tungsten mineralisation in drill core
• Fig-12 Barruecopardo Scheelite tungsten mineralisation under normal light and fluorescent light
• Fig-13 Overview plan of the main tungsten mineralised zones at Barruecopardo
• Fig-14 Detailed level plan of the FP Zone showing drillhole intersection data
• Fig-15 Flooded old mine workings at Valdegallegos

Several smaller historic tungsten workings and prospects, located on the large (~360 sq kilometre) permit area around Barruecopardo, demonstrate the extent of the Vitigudino tungsten province in Salamanca (Fig-16).  Of these workings the most significant is Saturno, which comprises a NW-SE zone of tungsten and gold-bearing quartz veining ranging from 3 -8 metres in thickness. This zone was mined historically for tungsten to shallow depths (< 40 metres) by an open pit some 300 metres long.  There are few historic records available for this operation; however the vein system was investigated for its gold potential in the early 1980s through detailed sampling from the base of the pit and also by widely spaced drilling to test depth extensions of the mineralisation below the base of the pit.  Better drill intersections include 2.0m grading 1.2% WO3 and 7.4 g/t gold and 6.0m grading 0.3% WO3 and 1.0 g/t gold.

• Fig-16 Tungsten prospects on the Salamanca permit area

• Barruecopardo Tungsten Project Review (0.83 MB, pdf)