06:05 AM EDT, 09/02/2025 (MT Newswires) -- Capstone Copper Corp. ( CSCCF ) over the holiday weekend reported that sulphide copper production is temporarily impacted due to a motor failure in the ball mill at the Mantoverde mine in Chile.
A statement noted that on August 24, the Mantoverde site experienced a failure of one of its two ball mill electrical drive motors. Over the next few days, it said, the team on site replaced the damaged motor with the spare in order to return to full capacity. However, on August 30th, the site experienced a failure of the second ball mill drive motor. Without an additional spare on site, this has resulted in a period of impacted production at Mantoverde, it added
Capstone said: "We estimate repairs to the ball mill motor will take approximately four weeks. During this period, we expect that Mantoverde will continue to operate at approximately half capacity through bypassing the ball mill, an operating mode for which the circuit is configured and that our team has successfully executed previously. An opportunity exists to further mitigate the effects of the interruption by rescheduling plant maintenance that had been planned for later in September to coincide with the ball mill downtime. Our team will continue to identify and execute mitigation plans, investigate the root cause of the motor failure, and advance a replacement and repair strategy to return to full capacity."
"At this time," it added, "based on an estimated four-week repair schedule while we continue to operate at half capacity during that period, we expect production to be impacted by 3,000 to 4,000 tonnes of copper in concentrate at Mantoverde. Capstone plans to provide further updates in due course."
CS was up 1.8% in Canada trade last Friday, before the Labour Day holiday weekend.