Konkola Signs $498M EPC for Africa's Largest Tailings Plant

Konkola Copper Mines has signed a US$498 million engineering, procurement and construction agreement with China NERIN Engineering for a new Tailings Leach Plant at Nchanga in Zambia - a facility that its minority shareholder ZCCM-IH expects to become the largest tailings leach plant in Africa, built to reprocess decades of stored tailings rather than mine new ore.

ZCCM Investments Holdings, which holds a 20.6 per cent stake in KCM, approved the project in September, and the EPC agreement was signed on 17 September 2026. KCM's controlling shareholder, CopperTech Metals - a US-domiciled company controlled by Vedanta Resources and established this year - holds 79.4 per cent. The plant will be funded by KCM from internally generated resources, sits outside Vedanta's initial US$1 billion investment programme for the company, and requires no capital contribution from ZCCM-IH. It will reprocess 546 million tonnes of historical tailings from the TD5 dam at Nchanga, grading 0.54 per cent copper, using proven SX-EW technology with a confirmed commercial recovery rate of 74 per cent. Designed to process 53,500 tonnes of tailings a day - 17.7 million tonnes a year - it should produce about 70,000 tonnes of LME Grade A copper cathode annually at full capacity, alongside KCM's existing leach plant. China NERIN will deliver the facility turnkey, supporting commissioning, performance testing and training; implementation is expected to take 24 months, with output reaching full capacity in the fourth year of operation. ZCCM-IH chief executive Kakenenwa Muyangwa called Nchanga's tailings one of the largest secondary copper resources in Africa, and KCM deputy CEO Satish Kumar tied the project to Zambia's target of 3 million tonnes of copper a year by 2031.

Tailings reprocessing flowsheets are among the most pump-intensive layouts in copper processing: slurry transfer from dam to plant, leach circuit duties, solvent extraction feeds and electrowinning circulation all place continuous demand on heavy-duty pumps, valves and wear-resistant linings. For suppliers, the structure of this award matters as much as its size. A turnkey EPC route means equipment orders will flow through China NERIN's procurement rather than directly from the mine owner, so vendors chasing the package need to be positioned on the contractor's approved bidders list early in the 24-month build. The ramp-up profile - full capacity only in year four - also points to a long aftermarket tail: wear parts, spares and service contracts in Zambia's Copperbelt reward suppliers with genuine local support, not just competitive unit prices. Buyers benchmarking comparable tailings projects should note the funding structure too. Because KCM is financing the plant internally, procurement decisions are likely to be paced by cash flow rather than a headline programme, and equipment packages may be phased. The lesson for pump and valve suppliers on a project sold as requiring no new mining is that the contest is won on wear life, energy draw and service response - the variables that decide whether a plant taking in 53,500 tonnes of tailings a day actually reaches its designed recovery.