Complete PEA Assessment Results For New Ingerbelle

VANCOUVER - Copper Mountain Mining Corporation has completed a Base Case Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) on its 75% owned New Ingerbelle property, which is located one kilometer from the Company's flagship operation, the Copper Mountain Mine, in southern British Columbia.  “New Ingerbelle represents a low capital, low risk, high quality development project in a world-class mining jurisdiction," said Gil Clausen, President and CEO. "Our next steps include evaluating various operational alternatives to test against this Base Case, which assumes supplanting Copper Mountain Mine production. We will study incorporating New Ingerbelle into the Copper Mountain mine plan using the existing mill and study expanding the mill at Copper Mountain to increase the combined annual production.  New Ingerbelle should give us tremendous flexibility as we execute our low risk growth strategy. This PEA demonstrates just how much potential value this project holds."

The New Ingerbelle mine design uses a US$2.75 per pound copper price Whittle pit shell (Measured and Indicated Resources only) generated using actual costs from the adjacent Copper Mountain Mine as a basis. Metal recoveries are based on historical Ingerbelle mill recoveries and metallurgical test work conducted on recent exploration drill core from the New Ingerbelle deposit.  

The Whittle pit shell was used as the basis for an ultimate design pit, which has a final haul road and waste dump designs incorporated. This ultimate pit was sequenced to produce a life of mine (LOM) plan which includes three pushback phases that include haul roads.  The study used the haulage profiles to determine mining equipment requirements. 

The PEA assumes New Ingerbelle mill feed would be trucked to the Copper Mountain operation, using Copper Mountain's existing mine equipment fleet, the 40,000 tonnes per day (tpd) mill and tailings facility.  Total mill feed mined is expected to be 175 million tonnes and total waste is expected to be 250 million tonnes for a low strip ratio of 1.43:1.  The production plan for New Ingerbelle is based only on Measured and Indicated Mineral Resources. All 24.6 million tonnes of Inferred Resources mined were considered as waste in the pit optimization and LOM scheduling.

The total initial capital cost required to start operations at New Ingerbelle is estimated to be approximately US$130 million. The estimate is largely due to the cost to complete a three-kilometer access road from New Ingerbelle to the Copper Mountain mine, pre-stripping and miscellaneous infrastructure upgrades. Total life of mine sustaining capital is expected to be US$63 million, which is mainly for mining equipment replacement and tailings dam expansions.