Open Pit Mining at the Jiulongshan Nepheline Deposit

Mining uses conventional drill-and-blast. Blasted ore is loaded by hydraulic excavators onto haul trucks and moved roughly 500 metres downhill to the crushing station. The short haul keeps transport cost out of the product price and gets ore to the plant the same shift.

Open-pit access is also a quality control method. Our geologists inspect each mining face directly, direct excavation toward the best ore zones and segregate different quality zones so the plant receives feed inside a known chemistry range.

The deposit runs high in total alkali — K2O plus Na2O consistently above 14% — with 20-21% Al2O3 and naturally low iron that wet processing then reduces further. The same mining lease also covers potassium feldspar and sodium feldspar mineralisation, which is how a single operation supplies the whole product range.

A rolling three-month mining plan matches ore quality against the current production schedule rather than mining whatever is easiest to reach.