Russian Copper Company (Ekaterinburg, Russia):

Altushkin I. A., Chairman of the Board of Directors
Korol Yu. A., Vice President for the Control of Production and Investment, e-mail: u.korol@mail.ru

Saint Petersburg Mining University (Saint Petersburg, Russia):

Cherepovitsyn A. E., Head of a Chair, Professor, Doctor of Economics Sciences

Depletion of raw materials base for Ural companies which refine the copper concentrates, along with the desire to save the steel powers of core enterprises lead to the necessity of searching and development of new sources of raw copper.
One of these sources may be a copper-porphyritic ores, which are located in the meridian direction along the Ural Mountains. The involvement of this type of ores for processing at the existing enrichment facilities is impossible because of the extremely low content of copper in the ore and the ores` extremely high strength. In this context, it is necessary to develop the new approaches to the enrichment of ore type using the most modern innovative high-performance equipment.
Russian Copper Company develops the new technologies and project solutions to ensure the development of both Tominskoe and Mikheevskiy deposits, which are located in the Chelyabinsk region. The total reserves of these objects reach to 800 million tons of ore. The average copper content in the ore is 0,4%.
Company selected the directions of research, design, development and innovative solutions, now suggest a significant improvement of technical and economic parameters of the project.
Russian Copper Company plans to invest about 700 million USD, for the development of the Miheevskiy deposit, including the investment of 506,6 million USD in the processing plant with a capacity of 18 million tons of ore and investment of 166,7 million USD in mine.
The project allows to get and process up to 380 million tons of ore and copper in the concentrate to 1,3 million tons.
The table of economic evaluation of various options for implementing an investment project shows that the innovation suggests an increase in NPV from 489,7 million USD to 895,1 million USD. Payback period is reduced from 13,7 to 11,4 years.
According to the results of the calculations, it is expedient to continue the funding works for improvement the project indicators of Miheevskiy mining and processing plant. The expediency acceleration of works on development of this deposit is based on innovative technologies and modern high-performance equipment.