June Cornish Mining Sundowner: progress at South Crofty tin mine

Last evening Barbara and I should have been relaxing by the bank of the Zambezi, at the end of the SAIMM's Copper-Cobalt Conference in Zambia, but after a 3 day travel experience from hell at the beginning of the week, where we got as far as Johannesburg, spending seven hours before returning to London (Monday's posting), that was not to be.

Instead, last night we were back at Falmouth's Chain Locker, our 3rd time in just over a week, last week's Biomining '23 and Sustainable Minerals '23 visits being almost a distant memory.

It was good to catch up with familiar faces at the June sundowner on a warm and sunny evening in Falmouth and to hear the latest Cornish news and gossip, with particularly good news on developments at South Crofty, an historic, high-grade, underground tin mine that started production in the sixteenth century, and continued operating until its closure in 1998. Activities on the regeneration of the mine by Cornish Metals continue at a good pace with the commencement of dewatering of the miles of old workings on-track for later this summer.

The metallurgical testwork programme is now well underway and early gravity response results have been very good and are in line with previous operational results when the mine closed down. The 20th century processing plant used heavy medium separation to pre-concentrate the ore, but things have moved on since then and the first bulk composite sample of the metallurgical testwork programme has arrived in Germany for XRT ore sorter testing at TOMRA Sorting GmbH.

This is all good news, as South Crofty has the 4th highest grade tin mineral resource globally and benefits from the presence of multiple shafts that can be used for future operations.

Tin is a critical metal, as defined by the UK, USA, and Canadian governments, with approximately 75% of the tin mined today coming from China, Myanmar and Indonesia; there is no primary tin production in Europe or North America. 

There will be more news, hopefully, next month, at the July sundowner, which will be at the Chain Locker on Thursday July 20th from 5.30 pm.

@barrywills