Modern Mining January 2018

TIN

Alphamin’s Bisie tin project takes off Alphamin Resources can be well pleased with 2017. It is the year in which its Bisie tin project finally made substantial progress – much to the surprise of many in the mining and investment community who thought that the challenges of developing the orebody, located in a remote and inacces- sible area of the politically unstable DRC, would prove too much for the TSX-V-listed junior, which now also has a sec- ondary listing on the JSE’s Alt-X. Modern Mining’s Arthur Tassell recently visited Bisie and was highly impressed by the progress being made on the project and the evident esprit de corps of the Alphamin personnel on site.

T he sceptics clearly did not take into account the determination of the Alphamin team, led by CEO Boris Kamstra, to bring into production the world’s richest tin deposit, no matter the obstacles involved. The team has now achieved the near impossible, with reliable access to Bisie established, an underground mine under development and work about to start on the erection of the process plant. The rate of progress is such that the processing fa- cility should be fully commissioned by the first quarter of 2019 with full commercial produc- tion being achieved towards the end of 2019. Bisie, of course, has been well-publicised (in no small measure due to Kamstra, whose mar- keting of the project has been compelling) and most readers will know by now that not only

is it the richest tin deposit in the world but the richest by far, with a grade (4,5 % for the overall resource though somewhat less for the reserve) that far exceeds anything else around – either in Africa or elsewhere. As Kamstra says, “In the world of tin, an ore- body with a grade of 1 % would be regarded as a stellar deposit. We have four-and-half-times this. Some of the intersections during our drilling programme – and we’ve drilled about 40 km of diamond drill holes – were so aston- ishing that we were forced to review our results on occasion. But there were no mistakes. The Bisie deposit is a genuine phenomenon. Putting it into perspective, it’s roughly equivalent to a gold deposit grading 22 to 24 g/t. “It’s worth adding that it is also the sec- ond biggest deposit in the world in terms of contained tin. It could be bigger still if we continued drilling but we’ve already defined a resource of just over 230 000 tonnes of tin, most of it in the measured and indicated categories, which is sufficient to support a mine produc- ing 9 600 tonnes of tin in concentrate a year over a 12,5-year mine life. Further drilling at this point is wholly unnecessary. The deposit we’re exploiting – Mpama North – continues at depth, so the likelihood is that the projected mine life can easily be extended.” The question mark that has always hung over Bisie is whether the size and quality of the Mpama North deposit is sufficient to offset both the remote location of Bisie (and the associated logistical problems) and the general political instability that afflicts North Kivu Province in

Pictured (from left) are George Petterson, respon- sible for Safety, Health and Security for Alphamin; Richard Robinson, the MD of Alphamin’s DRC subsidiary, Alphamin Bisie Mining SA (ABM); and Trevor Faber, Alphamin’s Chief Operating Officer.

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42  MODERN MINING  January 2018