The Luita plant will be the largest copper and cobalt processing plant in Africa, and the largest cobalt facility in the world. It is being built in modules by the

Central African Mining and Exploration Company The Central African Mining and Exploration Company plc (CAMEC) was a mining company active in the Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and in other parts of Africa. It was acquired by Eurasian Natural Resources Corporati ...

(CAMEC) in

Katanga Province Katanga was one of the four large provinces created in the Belgian Congo in 1914. It was one of the eleven provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1966 and 2015, when it was split into the Tanganyika, Haut-Lomami, Lualaba, ...

, Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Luita plant is designed to process copper and cobalt concentrate from Mukondo Mountain, which may be the richest cobalt reserve in the world. In July 2008 CAMEC said the resource estimate at Mukondo was 70 million tons of ore containing 1.5 million tons of copper and 500,000 tonnes of cobalt. The cobalt grade averages 1.2%, an exceptionally high concentration. The ore is concentrated at the Dense Media Separation (DMS) plant at Kakanda before being trucked to Luita. In February 2008 CAMEC and their partner,

Dan Gertler Dan Gertler (born 23 December 1973) is an Israeli billionaire businessman in natural resources and the founder and president of the DGI (Dan Gertler International) group of companies. He has diamond and copper mining interests in the Democrati ...

's Prairie International, announced that the Mukondo Mountain operations had restarted. In July 2008 CAMEC said the Luita facility, due to be completed later that year, would be the largest of its kind in the world. The target was to produce 100,000 tonnes per year of copper cathode. By the end of March, 2008, CAMEC had invested $200 million in Luita, and had three

SX/EW Solvent extraction and electrowinning (SX/EW) is a two-stage hydrometallurgical process that first extracts and upgrades copper ions from low-grade leach solutions into a solvent containing a chemical that selectively reacts with and binds the co ...

copper cathode trains in operation, and a small cobalt concentrator. Eventually there were plans for nine copper cathode trains and one cobalt train, each wide and in length. The under-roof plant will be in size. When running at full production, the plant was planned to produce 12,000 tons per year of cobalt cathode at 99.9% purity, about one third of total global production of cobalt in 2008. However, in July 2009 CAMEC announced a long term agreement under which CAMEC would deliver its entire annual production of cobalt in concentrate from Mukondo Mountain to Zhejiang Galico Cobalt & Nickel Materials of China. At that time production was running at between 6,000 and 8,000 tons per year of cobalt in concentrate.

References

{{reflist , refs= {{cite web , url=http://www.infomine.com/publications/docs/InternationalMining/Chadwick2008t.pdf , title=CAMEC - The Cobalt Champion , publisher=International Mining , date=July 2008 , accessdate=2011-11-18 {{cite web , url=http://www.miningweekly.com/article/camec-prairie-restart-operations-at-drc-mine-2008-02-07 , title=Camec, Prairie restart operations at DRC mine , author=Christy van der Merwe , date=7 February 2008 , work=Mining weekly , accessdate=2011-11-15 Copper mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo