The Project is located ~90km northeast of Albany in the southwest corner of Western Australia. The Southdown deposit extends approximately 12km in length, under Mining Lease and Retention Licence covering an area of more than 120 square kilometres on largely freehold farming property.

The Southdown deposit occupies the core of a gently east plunging, overturned tight isoclinal syncline with a steeply south dipping axial surface. The deposit is offset by moderately northeast dipping dextral reverse faults and subsidiary steeply south-east dipping sinistral faults. Currently the resource extends for 11 kilometres of the 12 kilometre strike length of the deposit, with variable depths ranging from a surface outcrop in the west, to 480 metres below surface in the east.

Mining will be undertaken by conventional bulk mining methods utilising drill and blast, hydraulic face shovels and dump trucks coupled to a run of mine (ROM) stockpile. Ore will be trucked directly from the blasted faces to either direct tip into the primary crusher or onto the ROM stockpile, as proposed within DFS 2012, but with a reduced mining rate to satisfy a nominal concentrate production rate of 5mtpa.

The final proposed pit is six kilometres long, one kilometre wide and about 370 metres deep.

The reserve within mine lease M70/1309 has the capacity to provide a nominal 5mtpa of concentrate for up to 28 years of mine life. This study uses contractor mining.

- subscription is required.