Cyprium grows out WA copper resource to 1Mt as prices hit 11mth high

Cyprium Metals (ASX:CYM) has inked a new JORC resource for its WA Nifty mine with the total now reaching 1M tonnes of copper.

The microcap’s shares were up 26% in the first hour of trade on Thursday.

That’s from a base of 119Mt of ore at 0.84% copper with 95% of the company’s global resource now under measured an indicated confidence levels.

The updated JORC also now incorporates “past underground modelling” to support plans for a large open-cut mine.

In the background: Cyprium’s announcement comes as copper prices hit 11 month highs overnight on the back of Chinese smelter output curbs.

This now puts copper prices at over US$4/lb.

“Nifty is one of the largest non-operational copper projects in Australia, and the only brownfield project that can be reactivated in short order,” Cyprium EC Matt Fifield said.

“This update is the result of a disciplined process run by the Cyprium team and MEC Mining. Our objective with this MRE scope was to ensure a strong foundation for our planning work, including pit optimisation and mining studies.”

Backing up the new JORC is more than 30Y of drilling data relevant to the site accumulated across multiple operators – a dataset the company calls “robust.”

The company has also flagged chance for further enhancements could be available through heap leaching historical ‘leftovers’ of which there’s some 17Mt at an estimated 0.53% copper.

A sharp jump in Cyprium shares this morning see its 1M performance jumping +38.24%.

The company, which has a current market cap of $35M, has underperformed the materials sector -77.3% over the last year.

However, the stock had $22.5M in cash to finish December.

Shares last at 2.4cps.