Red River Resources announced today that production has commenced at its Thalanga zinc project south-west of Charters Towers.

Red River has offtake agreements in place with Trafigura for the Thalanga zinc and lead concentrates and with Glencore for copper concentrate over the first three years of production.

“The start of production at the Thalanga zinc project, ahead of schedule and under budget, is an outstanding achievement and all credit must go to our site team, headed by Thalanga GM Karl Spaleck,” Red River managing director Mel Palancian said.

“We acquired the Thalanga project in 2014, and to be restarting production with zinc at 10-year highs is an outstanding result for our shareholders.”

Red River bought the Thalanga processing plant and surrounding tenements from failed miner Kagara’s administrators in 2014.

Full plant commissioning commenced at the start of September, and the first ore was fed into the circuit on September 6.

Stoping commenced at the West 45 deposit on September 8, and the first load of production ore was delivered to the Thalanga ROM pad on September 9.

The site is expected to produce an annual average of 21,400 tonnes of zinc, 3600 tonnes of copper, 5000 tonnes of lead, 2000 ounces of
gold and 370,000 ounces of silver in concentrate over an initial mine life of five years.

Red River is working to increase its resource base at the project, with plans to mine the Thalanga Far West and Waterloo deposits after the West 45 deposit, whilst defining a resource at the Liontown East discovery and undertaking regional exploration to discover the next generation of deposits in the area.

Pybar Mining Services was awarded the West 45 underground mining contract early this year.