The Tarutinskoye Company is planning to start mining copper ore in the Karabalyk District of Kazakhstan’s Kostanay Region. The company has been conducting exploration since 2013, as detailed in the mining plan available on Kazakhstan’s Unified Environmental Portal.
The East Tarutinskoye deposit was added to the state balance of mineral resources in early 2021, with confirmed reserves of 2.226 million tons of ore, containing 22.1 thousand tons of copper (average content of 1.09%), 5.6 tons of silver (average content of 2.76 g/t), and 88.5 kg of gold (average content of 0.39 g/t).
In addition, off-balance reserves amount to 10 million tons of ore, containing 69.7 thousand tons of copper (0.7%), 27.4 tons of silver (2.81 g/t), and 297.5 kg of gold (1.19 g/t).
The company plans to extract the ore through open-pit mining across three quarries: South, North 1, and North 2. The estimated period for industrial exploitation is five years, with a maximum annual production capacity of 500 thousand tons of ore.
Currently, there is no infrastructure, including transportation, in place to support the mining operations. Therefore, extraction at the East Tarutinskoye deposit is not expected to begin until 2028. The company still needs to finalize construction projects for an evaporation pond, an access road, and a rail spur at the Buskul station.
While the company has not disclosed which factories will process the ore, it has indicated that the most efficient enrichment method has already been selected.
