Lota Bay is located in the Gulf of Arauco, in the Municipality of Lota, Concepcion Province, Chile, South America. The project is a bituminous thermal coal deposit that lies on the sea floor to a depth of 10 meters and is directly adjacent to the shoreline of the bay, and is easily accessible by local industrial infrastructure, including a major dock and processing plant facilities.
The concession is under exclusive option to Suburban Minerals, which has the right to acquire 100% of the project.
The resource is there as a result of 145 yrs of dumping and spillage of coal that was mined by the nearby Lota coal operations, which were exhausted and shut down in the 1990's. The initial reserve calculations in zone 1 of the concession are 275,000, and 90,000 probable, tonnes of recoverable bituminous thermal coal having the following characteristics: 6700 Kcal/Kg, has less than 1% sulfur, and contains 14% ash.
Zone 1 of the concession encompasses 660,000 square meters of sea floor, where the coal rests in stratum, as well as two hectares of industrial land at the foot of the dock adjacent to the resource, where the land based coal preparation work will take place. All the necessary infrastructure is in place on the site; grid power, water, sewage disposal, highway and rail access, as well as a ready labor force from the nearby city of Lota, population 52,000.
The Lota Bay Coal Project has the support of the Chilean Government and the local community, which will benefit significantly from job creation as well as from environmental remediation and cleanup. Financial modeling shows conclusively that the recovery operation is economically viable and profitable at prevailing market coal prices and at the current proven resource level