News

March 04, 2008

Finders Resources Puts The Bugs To Work At Wetar

By Rob Davies

Starting small and working your way up to something larger often makes for a sensible strategy. That way all the bugs are taken out of a project before too much money has been spent. Some projects need bugs, of the biological kind, and one of those is the Wetar copper project being developed by Finders Resources on the eponymous island in the Indonesian archipelago. Managing director Chris Farmer, on a day trip to London from Australia, told Minews that test results from the Kali Kuning site on Wetar have shown that bacterial leaching gives recoveries of up to 85 per cent, while on Wetar’s Lerokis deposit recoveries stand at 80 per cent. This work is what has made the project viable, as earlier plans to treat the copper bearing material off-site by a hydro-metallurgical process did not survive scrutiny.

To test the process on an industrial scale a small plant is being shipped to the island with the aim of producing five tonnes of copper cathode a day. It’s a cost effective way to make sure the process works as well in the field as it does in the lab. If all goes well the plant should be in production by the middle of the year and will pave the way for a larger plant that will have the capacity to produce 20-25,000 tonnes of cathode a year starting in 2010.

Chris was reluctant to...