The company Serbia Zijin Copper d.o.o. Bor plans to maximally expand the mining of the Bor river deposit

As stated in the request for a decision on the need for an environmental impact assessment of the project to open the Bor River deposit up to K-455, which was submitted by Serbia Zijin Copper to the Ministry of the Environment, currently the mining of ore from the Borska Reka deposit is carried out up to K-235 m.

It is added that the exploration of the Bor river deposits was carried out in the period from 1976 to 1999, and then reserves were verified above the k-455 m level in the total amount of 319,967,170 t of ore with an average copper content of 0.5% Cu and accompanying elements.

However, based on the study on copper and gold resources and reserves, the balance reserves of copper and gold in the Borska reka deposit up to k-800 m above sea level, with a minimum economic content of 0.3%, were certified.

– Given that it is planned to continue exploitation below the level of k-235 m, up to which the project documentation has been prepared and approved, the first phase of opening the deeper parts of the deposit, i.e. the construction of accessible underground mine rooms, will be up to the level of k-455 m of the deposit – the request states.

For this reason, it is stated, the company made the decision to create a supplementary mining project for the opening of the Bor River deposit up to an elevation of k-455 m.

The project envisages the construction of 3 ventilation shafts and one service shaft in the first phase, a service and export shaft, as well as the main horizontal rooms for connecting the vertical rooms at the designed levels of deposit opening.

The Bor river deposit is the largest and deepest deposit within the Bor ore field. It is located in the Bor river basin, northwest of the existing surface mine.

As the Novosti wrote in 2019 when Zijin, in cooperation with the Bor Institute for Mining and Metallurgy, began the development of the main mining project for the exploitation of the Bor river underground deposit, it was estimated that this site hides reserves of almost four million tons of copper, 130 tons of gold and more than 1,000 tons of silver, the value of which is greater than USD 30 billion.

It is also stated that it is assumed that Bor River hides much more than the so far established reserves of about 320 million tons of ore – even more than a billion tons, with an average content of one percent of copper, which is almost three times more than in the RTB mines that are are currently exploiting.

Information from 2002 also testifies to how attractive the Bor River is as a deposit, which in its mineralogy resembles the underground copper mine Čukaru Peki. Then the World Bank, before announcing the first tender for the sale of RTB, issued a study according to which the future of mining here should be based on the exploration and exploitation of that deposit – reported Novosti.

Sign up for updates & special reports