Copper Intelligence and CoTec Target DRC’s Historical Copper Tailings
Copper Intelligence and CoTec Form Joint Venture to Reprocess Historical Copper Tailings in DRC
Copper Intelligence and CoTec Holdings have finalised the terms of a joint venture aimed at identifying and developing opportunities to reprocess historical copper tailings in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The venture will focus on the country’s historic copper districts, where decades of mining have generated large volumes of tailings that may still contain recoverable copper and other valuable minerals.
The joint venture company is being incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. While the partners have agreed on the framework, no specific asset has yet been selected and no binding agreement has been signed for the development of any tailings project.
Potential opportunities will undergo detailed technical and legal due diligence before the partners commit funding. Individual projects will also require separate binding agreements and approval from the relevant independent board members.
Recovering value from historic tailings
The partnership will explore the use of CoTec’s mineral-processing technologies to improve the economic potential of historical tailings deposits and certain marginal or undeveloped copper deposits.
The DRC has a long history of copper mining, particularly across the Central African Copperbelt.
Large volumes of tailings have accumulated from industrial operations dating back to the 1950s, including mining activities carried out by state-owned Gécamines.
Some historic deposits contain significant quantities of copper. The Kolwezi Tailings Project, for example, was estimated to contain approximately 112.8 million tonnes of oxide tailings grading 1.49% copper and 0.32% cobalt, representing about 1.68 million tonnes of contained copper.
The partners believe modern processing technologies could potentially unlock value from such legacy materials while reducing the need to develop entirely new mining deposits.
US financing targeted
Once the joint venture has identified and assembled a sufficiently large portfolio of opportunities, the partners intend to seek financing from the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and other potential funding sources.
The strategy is to develop a portfolio large enough to attract institutional financing rather than pursuing individual small-scale opportunities in isolation.
However, the scale and timing of any future investment will depend on the results of technical and legal due diligence, the quality and volume of the tailings identified and the economics of reprocessing them.
Copper Intelligence is already advancing several copper opportunities in the DRC, including the Butembo project in North Kivu and the Sampwe project in Haut-Katanga.
The joint venture with CoTec expands the company’s activities into the reprocessing of historical mining materials, while giving CoTec an opportunity to deploy its processing technologies in one of the world’s major copper-producing regions.
For the DRC, the initiative could offer an additional route to recover copper from existing mining waste and legacy deposits, potentially extending the value of the country’s long mining history.
However, the project remains at an early stage, with the identification of suitable assets, completion of due diligence and execution of individual project agreements still required before development can begin.
