Fairport appointed engineer and designer for Barrecopardo project

As part of the on-going development of their Barrecopardo Tungsten project in Spain, Ormonde Mining have recently appointed Fairport Engineering Ltd as their ‘Engineer and Designer’. The initial part of this assignment is carrying out engineering studies to facilitate the placement of critical path equipment orders that will secure the overall project delivery timescale.

Barruecopardo is located in the Salamanca Province of the Castilla y León Region in north-west Spain. The location is a brownfield site, the deposit having previously been worked to shallow depths by a series of small open pit workings and one larger open pit from the 1930s until 1982. The previous operations produced a clean, high-grade, tungsten concentrate.

The Tungsten mineralization occurs in quartz veins as coarse grained scheelite, with minor to trace wolframite, that form part of a major granite-hosted sheeted vein system. The mineralization is very coarse and is amenable to low-cost gravity concentration. Testwork has shown that crushing to 5mm is sufficient to achieve effective liberation of the tungsten minerals for gravity pre-concentration. The fundamental unit process operations will therefore be:

• four-stage crushing to -5mm,
• gravity concentration of heavy tungsten minerals by jigs and spirals
• a small clean-up and tabling circuit.

Since neither a primary grinding circuit nor a tailings dam will be required this will result in lower than average capital and operating costs.

Fairport believe that three key factors have lead Ormonde to place this assignment with the company:

• Extensive and proven hard rock crushing and screening expertise – projects totalling over 50 million tonnes a year have been successfully completed over the last 15 years
• A significant and longstanding capability in minerals processing systems – gravity separation plants valued at over £45 million have been successfully delivered over the last five years
• Previous experience of materials processing and handling plant construction in Spain.

Paul Fitton, Fairport’s managing director, is exceptionally pleased to be part of this project, because, as he explained: ‘Over the last five years the company has been at the fore-front of major high-end recycling including municipal waste and automotive shredder residue projects as well as, in recent times, strategic projects involving the processing, handling and storage of both biomass and alternative fuels in the power and port sectors. Not withstanding, minerals processing  has always been an important component of our core services, with this latest assignment to our minerals projects portfolio being both welcome and exciting. We will be dedicating a key team with over 100 years of combined processing and engineering experience to the project and look forward to providing a highly professional, timely and successful outcome for Ormonde.’