Canadian miner Teck Resources on Friday announced that the Zafranal copper project, in Peru, had received regulatory approval, marking an important step in the company’s strategy to grow its copper business.

“Zafranal will be a low-cost, long-life operation, and is a key part of Teck’s industry-leading pipeline of high-quality, low-cost copper assets in well-established mining jurisdictions in the Americas,” said CEO Jonathan Price.

Located in the Arequipa region, in southern Peru, Zafranal has an expected mine life of 19 years and will produce copper/gold concentrates through an openpit mining and conventional concentration process.

Copper ore processing, including crushing, grinding, flotation, thickening and filtering, will be carried out in a concentrator plant with a processing capacity of up to 80 000 t/d of ore throughput. The mine and concentrator are expected to produce an average of 133 000 t of copper contained in concentrate during its first five years of production.

A feasibility study of the Zafranal project was completed in June 2019 and was updated in January 2020 to include discrete value-added engineering updates.

Moving forward, the Zafranal team will update project capital and operating cost estimates and will develop detailed engineering plans as well as minor permitting activities through 2023.

Teck said the project could be positioned for a formal project sanction decision as early as the first half of 2024.

Teck owns an 80% stake in Zafranal and Japanese firm Mitsubishi Materials holds the remaining 20%.