News

July 21, 2008

Connemara Mining Lays Out Some Clever Bets On The Zinc Board Of Ireland

By Charles Wyatt

Frankly, when you’re at the exploration stage it doesn’t matter much what the price of the target metal is, as it will probably take you well over five years to get into production - the price only gets really important at the time of the feasibility study. It may, of course, affect the opinions of institutions that get asked for more money in the meantime, but Aim-traded Connemara Mining is in the fortunate position that Teck Cominco is funding exploration at Connemara’s world class discovery at Stonepark in Limerick.

Teck Cominco is looking hard for new production as it recently agreed with partner Xstrata to shut down the Pillara mine on the Lennard Shelf off Broome in Western Australia. Pillara was only restarted last year and was supposed to run for four years producing between 70,000 and 80,000 tonnes per year of zinc in concentrate. It never got to full capacity and was eventually overcome by a combination of poor grades and output, lower metals prices, and a strong Australian dollar. It’s worth noting...