Billionaire Robert Friedland's Congo copper discovery is now worth 12 million tonnes of metal

Ivanhoe Mines has increased the estimated copper at its Makoko district in the Democratic Republic of Congo by 30%, taking the contained metal to roughly 12 million tonnes.

The updated resource, published Tuesday, puts the district at about 42 million tonnes of indicated material grading 2.66% copper and 612 million tonnes of inferred material grading 1.80%. The Kiala deposit, found in 2020, is unchanged at eight million tonnes grading 2.67%.

Those grades are the point. Most large copper deposits in production worldwide run below 1%, and a 2.66% indicated grade puts Makoko among the richest new discoveries anywhere.

The increase came from roughly 64,000 metres of diamond drilling across 106 holes over the fifteen months since the previous estimate. That added about 130,000 tonnes of contained copper to the indicated category, up 17%, and 2.63 million tonnes to the inferred category, up 31%.

Robert Friedland, who founded Ivanhoe and serves as executive co-chairman, said the Western Forelands discoveries continue to grow explosively and called the area the most important sedimentary-hosted copper basin on the planet. His geologists have identified more than 55 million tonnes of copper across the wider basin, and he said it is hard to find a copper system larger anywhere in the past thirty years.

He also put a number on the discovery rate. Ivanhoe is finding 100 million pounds of contained copper for every 1,000 metres drilled, which he described as absurdly high.

The resource could grow again. About 60,000 metres of drilling completed this year was not included in the estimate, and the mineralisation remains open in several directions.

Ivanhoe plans a scoping study in the first quarter of 2027, evaluating a combination of shallow open pits and underground mining, an approach it believes would cut initial capital costs and shorten the time to first production. Site preparation has already started, including fencing, road building and environmental baseline work.

The Western Forelands licence area covers 2,426 square kilometres, more than six times the size of the Kamoa-Kakula copper complex next door. Ivanhoe owns Kamoa-Kakula with China's Zijin Mining and the Congolese government, and took it from discovery to first production in under six years.

The company also holds more than 22,000 square kilometres of exploration licences in Angola and signed a memorandum with Zambia's mines ministry in September 2024 covering licences three times larger than the Western Forelands, on a theory that the Central African Copperbelt extends southwest through both countries.

Marna Cloete is president and chief executive.