The Cañariaco Norte and Cañariaco Sur deposits are considered to be examples of porphyry-copper systems. The Cañariaco Norte deposit is a large, near surface, bulk mineable porphyry copper deposit located in the Lambeyeque region of northern Peru.

The Cañariaco Norte deposit is hosted within a multiphase intrusive–breccia complex approximately 1.7 km in strike extent and 1.1 km wide. The deposit has been drill-tested to a depth of approximately 770 m and remains open at depth. The majority of the copper–gold mineralization is hosted within the intrusive and breccia units, but locally extends for variable distances into the enclosing volcanic units. Intrusive units comprise approximately 55 to 60% of the deposit, breccias approximately 30 to 35%, and pre-mineral volcanic rocks approximately 5 to 10%.

The intrusive units are nested and collectively roughly oval in shape, with older intrusive rocks being cut by successively younger intrusive bodies. In general, the intrusive units are north–south-trending, steeply-dipping bodies. The breccia units cut the intrusive units, are oval to circular in shape, and are steeply plunging. The dykes generally strike northwest–southeast with a steep southwesterly dip. The shape and positioning of the intrusive, breccias, and dyke units was largely controlled by northwest–southeast- and northeast–southwest-trending faults (Casselman et al., 2008).

In general, the highest copper grades (>0.5% Cu) occur in the b ........

Open-pit mining was selected as the extraction method considering the size of the resource, grade tenor, grade distribution and proximity to topographic surface for the deposit. The opinion of the QP is that open-pit mining offers the most viable approach for development.

Mill feed and waste will be drilled, blasted and loaded by electric hydraulic face shovels and front-end loaders from 15-m-high benches. Haul trucks will haul above cut-off mineralized material to the mineralized material crusher, or short-term stockpile as required. Waste will be hauled during pre-production to the WSF, and during production to the waste crusher to be located near the mineralized material crusher. During production, crushed waste will be conveyed to the plant site where it will be combined with dewatered tails and stacked at the WSF. Based on earlier internal desktop trade-off studies, the mine plan considers an initial 40 kt/d processing rate which is later doubled to 80 kt/d in production Year 7. The peak mining capacity is 54.6 Mt/a.

Pit Slopes
The pit slopes used for LG shell generation were based on the detailed slope design parameters provided by Knight Piésold. Overall slope angles were estimated for each sector based on the depth of an assumed likely ultimate pit shell, and anticipated number of pit ramps crossing each sector. The resulting overall slopes used were 37.6º, 36.0º, and 36.4º for the east, southwest and northwest sectors respectively Select sh ........

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