How do development, production, grade, recovery, and commodity-price assumptions shape the mine plan?
Model profile
Copper Small-Scale Mining
An artisanal and small-scale copper mining enterprise or cooperative, set up for Zambia, the DR Congo or any country you choose: Copperbelt oxide ore hand-sorted and sold to a local leach plant on a grade grid, sulphide ore sold as feed to a concentrator or exported, or an artisanal cooperative selling to an aggregator. Tested the way a buyer and a lender would: the product's grade, what the buyer actually pays against the LME, the copper royalty, the haul, the rains, and debt sized on the cash the mine can service.
Decision scope
Questions this model helps you examine
What capital, operating cost, closure provision, and financing structure are required?
How do price, grade, recovery, cost, and schedule downside cases affect investment returns?
Model capabilities
What this model includes
The profile below is generated from the same catalogue and workspace definitions used by the application.
- Run-of-mine ore to a hand-sorted product: mass yield, grade, recovery and moisture
- Oxide ore dug free, or sulphide ore drilled and blasted
- The buyer pays on a share of LME, as concentrator feed on recovered copper, or on a leach plant's grade-price grid
- Logistics by route segment, per wet tonne-kilometre, with border and port charges
- A resource limit, an exploration and bulk-sampling stage, and the November to March rains
- Researched Zambia and DR Congo profiles, and every other country selectable
- Zambia's incremental sliding-scale copper royalty on the LME value of the copper sold
- Local-currency costs with pass-through, and a local-currency or dollar loan
- Debt sized and sculpted on cash available for debt service, with a reserve, a lease and an offtaker prepayment
- Break-even copper price, payability and haul distance, and a lender scorecard
- A copper price deck, named scenarios, an NPV tornado and a Monte Carlo
Build the case
Inputs and workspaces
- CasesLoad the oxide, selective, sulphide, export, cooperative or DR Congo case
- Mine and costsCountry, licence type and term, geology and resource, capacity, the LME price, unit costs, diesel and the local currency
- Mine planCapacity, utilisation, strip ratio, grade, recovery, price and payability by year
- SeasonalityHow the rains spread production across the months
- Product and buyerMass yield, moisture, how the buyer pays, settlement and an outage
- Price grid and routeGrade-price bands, deleterious-element penalties, a sliding-scale royalty and the route to the buyer
- Staff and operating costsPositions, pay, start dates, sizing from productivity, and other operating expenses
- Initial costs and assetsStart-up costs, the four asset classes, replacement and the lease share
- FinancingEquity, the start-up gap, the term loan and its sizing, the reserve, the lease and the prepayment
- Fiscal and permitsTax regime, royalty, levies, the Environmental Protection Fund and VAT
- Valuation and riskCost of capital, closure, the price deck and the Monte Carlo
- Due diligenceLicence, environment, offtake, resource, responsible sourcing, safety and community
Review the result
Outputs and analysis
- Project NPVUSD, at WACC
- Project IRRUnlevered, after tax
- WACCDiscount rate
- PaybackMonths
- Minimum DSCRYears principal is repaid
- Loan life cover ratioAt first repayment
- Term loanSized by the model
- Total fundingAll sources
- 18 additional metrics in the workspace
- Financial statementsDetailed schedules
- Lender view, mine plan, funding & valuationDetailed schedules
- Risk & analyticsDetailed schedules
Designed for review
Who this model is for
- Mine owners and project sponsors
- Technical and operating teams
- Financial advisers
- Investors and lenders
Governed evidence
The review trail stays with the result.
Each completed calculation preserves the model version, saved inputs, reporting-currency snapshot, immutable run, and result fingerprint used for its reports.
- Version-controlled calculation logic
- Saved assumptions and scenarios
- Immutable calculation runs
- Reporting context preserved in exports
Ready to explore the case?