New Century Resources has secured a long-term offtake agreement for zinc concentrate produced from its Century zinc operations in the lower Gulf.

The company said the offtake agreements with Mercuria Energy Trading and Transamine Trading reflected the strong zinc
market fundamentals and current scarcity in supply of large tonnage zinc concentrate offtake available around the world.

“The execution of these initial offtake agreements represents another exciting milestone for New Century as we progress toward production in Q3 2018,” New Century managing director Patrick Walta said.

“New Century is very pleased with the strong demand shown by smelters and commodity traders in its tender process, which is a clear demonstration of the quality of New Century’s concentrate and the current strong fundamentals of the market zinc.”

The deal with Mercuria and Transamine for a portion of the New Century concentrate marks the first agreements to result from New Century’s concentrate tender process, initiated in late 2017.

The total tender was for up to 1.5Mt of zinc concentrate from the Century zinc mine, representing expected production from the first 3.5 years of scheduled operations. Mercuria and Transamine will be taking about half of that output.

New Century said it had shortlisted further preferred offtake customers and was progressing the development and potential execution of formal offtake agreements with these parties.

The company plans to restart operations at the former MMG site this year, initially focusing on tailings reprocessing.

It recently announced that the first stage of a planned roll out of renewable energy generation within the mix of energy supply for the Century site had begun, with the engagement of SunSHIFT to provide a modular Solar PV array.

The proposed operations at Century will utilise the existing infrastructure at the mine, including a multi-train flotation plant, 700-person camp, private airport with sealed runway, mining fleet, grid power connection, 304km slurry pipeline and its own concentrate shipping port and transhipment vessel in Karumba.