Mining operations

The quick answer is that an underground mine is what it sounds like – mining activity going on underground. As opposed to this, an open pit mine is when mining activities can be done close to the earth’s surface. An underground or open pit mine is chosen depending on where the minerals and metals are located.

Open pit mining is often less costly to establish as there is no need for advanced infrastructure projects, such as preparing with tunnelling systems or shafts. The minerals in our Spanish project are located close to the surface, and as such, an open pit mine is what we are looking for.

On the other hand, in Hautalampi, the minerals are located deeper down the earth. Our current plan is to establish an underground mine. However, the ore body (the rock formation where the minerals are located) is situated in the old copper mine of Keretti, where existing infrastructure is already in place. Therefore, underground mining in our Finnish project will not start from scratch. We anticipate using existing infrastruct

In short, resources are the potential, whereas reserve is what we have for certain.

In mining, the term resource is used to describe the potential of a mine. For example, drilling is conducted in different places to investigate how many minerals there are in a certain area, and the drill cores are being analysed. Based on this, a mineral estimate is possible to calculate – the resource.

Moving on with several drilling campaigns will give a much clearer view of the potential. At a certain point in time, we will be able to know for certain how many minerals there are in a location. That is referred to as the reserve. For example, the gold reserve is commonly used to describe how much gold a certain country has at hand.

Important to point out in this context is that even if a mine is up and running with known reserves, there might still be additional resources available in the mine

A JORC (The Australasian Code for Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves) or NI 43-101) (National Instrument 43-101) are two different international standards for calculating the mineral resources in any mine and are commonly seen as important standards to estimate the economic potential of any mining project. Both standards have the same function and are very similar. Wh

The general next step would be to do the prefeasibility study (PFS) and look at the project’s economic value. The PFS includes an economic projection including both OPEX and CAPEX costs relating to mining operations. The drilling campaigns that we have conducted plays an important role in giving us the correct information for the PFS.

We have several different options on the table for financing our mining operations. Below are the options we are looking at. 

We can raise money from investors and the capital market. 

We can close off-taker agreements with pre-financing options.

We can obtain additional governmental grants. 

We can work with public-private partnerships.

We can partner with industry partners such as automotive producers, battery manufacturers or mining companies.

We will further advance our strategy in this area when we have the pre-feasibility study (PFS) in place. We have been working on positioning Eurobattery Minerals among all potential