Ivanhoe Electric (TSX:IE) is nearing a key milestone at its Santa Cruz Copper Project in Arizona with expected completion of Preliminary Feasibility Study (PFS) in June 2025.
The company is rapidly progressing advanced stage engineering studies for its “modern, high-grade”, underground Santa Cruz Project.
The project’s PFS is scheduled to be completed in June 2025 and will be used to advance project financing discussions.
Ivanhoe Electric is advancing applications for key project permits with a goal of starting construction activities as soon as the first half of 2026.
The PFS expands on an initial assessment released in September 2023, which the company says demonstrated attractive economics “on a long-lived and high-grade underground copper project capable of producing approximately 80,000 tonnes of copper per year, including 57,000 tonnes of pure copper cathode for the US domestic market”.
Meanwhile, Executive Chairman Robert Friedland and CEO Taylor Melvin are pleased to see the 20 March Executive Order signed by US President Donald Trump to accelerate the domestic production of critical metals, including copper.
Melvin says the decisive action by the President highlights the urgent need to expand domestic minerals output to support supply chain security in the US.
“This important Order will help revitalise domestic mineral production by improving the permitting process and providing financial support to qualifying domestic projects. As a United States company with an advanced high-quality, high-grade copper project on private land in Arizona, we are excited about what the executive order means for the future of domestic copper production,” the CEO continues.
The executive order invokes the use of the Defense Production Act as part of a broad US Government effort to expand domestic minerals production on national security grounds, as reported by Mining.com.au.
As it relates to project permitting, the order states that it will “identify priority projects that can be immediately approved or for which permits can be immediately issued, and take all necessary or appropriate actions … to expedite and issue the relevant permits or approvals”.
Furthermore, the order includes provisions to accelerate access to private and public capital for domestic projects, including the creation of a “dedicated mineral and mineral production fund for domestic investments” under the Development Finance Corporation (DFC).
Ivanhoe Electric is a company that combines advanced mineral exploration technologies with electric metals exploration projects predominantly located in the US.
It uses an “accurate and powerful” Typhoon geophysical surveying system, together with advanced data analytics provided by our subsidiary, Computational Geosciences to accelerate and de-risk the mineral exploration process as we seek to discover new deposits of critical metals that may otherwise be undetectable by traditional exploration technologies.
Write to Adam Orlando at Mining.com.au
Images: Ivanhoe Electric
