Halo Minerals
Checking in.
Good Morning Team.
Several weeks since Halo Minerals listed on AIM, and it’s time for a check-in.
First up: the listing itself. The bottom line here is that one shareholder was not properly secured, and decided to sell on day one. I have it on good authority that this shareholder has now been cleared out, so the runway to recovery is clear.
With being said, when Halo came to market, the investment case rested on three pillars.
First, 53 million tonnes of copper-bearing tailings sitting on a Chilean beach, the environmental legacy of four decades of upstream mining by Andes and El Salvador, now permitted and shovel-ready for dredging and reprocessing.
Their Competent Person Report assigned a post-tax NPV of $164 million and an IRR of just under 51% at $5.30/lb copper and $4,300/oz gold. Copper is currently sitting above $6.00/lb and gold is above $4,600/oz.
Second, a management team that had already done the hard yards — RCA environmental approval secured in October 2025 and JORC-compliant resources in place since 2016.
Third, an organic growth story in plain sight: the tailings don’t stop at the waterline. An estimated 100 million tonnes of the same material extends into Chañaral Bay — potentially doubling or tripling the resource base within the existing mining concession footprint, at no incremental exploration cost.
All three remain intact - and the team is now demonstrating operational follow-through.
Post-IPO: Doing What They Said They’d Do
Talk is cheap; RNS updates are not. And Halo has initiated four parallel workstreams since launch.
Plant design optimisation — where the CAPEX savings are likely to come from
The $86.8 million initial capital figure in the CPR was built from detailed vendor quotes: Propipe for the processing plant and beach infrastructure and IHC for the dredging equipment and systems.
That rigour is reassuring, but CPR-stage estimates are not the same as construction-ready engineering, and the gap between the two almost always contains savings — if the right engineers are looking for them.
The plant design engineers now engaged are working through the flowsheet with fresh eyes. The areas most likely to yield CAPEX reduction are worth thinking through.
The SX/EW circuit — solvent extraction followed by electrowinning — accounts for a significant portion of the plant cost. It’s also relatively standardised technology with a competitive vendor market. Specification optimisation here, particularly around the number of mixer-settler stages and electrowinning cell configuration, can move costs sharply without compromising recoveries.
The leaching circuit is the other candidate. Acid consumption is the single largest operating cost driver at Playa Verde, representing around 25% of total opex (possibly more with Hormuz closed).
The engineering review will be looking at tank sizing, residence time, and whether the current multi-stage agitated leach design can be simplified for the upper domain material — which has lower carbonate content and therefore lower acid demand — without sacrificing copper extraction.
The dredging specification from IHC is probably the least negotiable element. The custom electric cutter suction dredge is designed around the specific material characteristics of the Chañaral tailings — non-cohesive, variable fines content, tidal interaction — and cutting corners on dredge specification is where projects get into trouble.
However, the support equipment package and spares allowance typically carry contingency costs that can be trimmed once operational parameters are better understood.
A 10% reduction in CAPEX from $86.8 million saves $8.7 million and swings NPV by approximately $9 million at the base case copper price. At $6.00/lb copper, the leverage is even greater. These are not immaterial numbers for a small cap.
Environmental consultants: compliance is the licence to operate
The October 2025 RCA approval was the milestone that made Halo constructable. But RCA approval is only the beginning of an ongoing compliance relationship with Chilean regulators, and the 80-plus conditions attached to it require active management.
The environmental consultants now engaged are doing two things simultaneously.
First, they’re building the compliance monitoring framework for construction and operations — dust suppression protocols, noise monitoring stations, water balance management and the flocculant programme for tailings redeposition.
Breach of RCA conditions can trigger operational suspension, which in a 7-year mine life life to exhaust the initial Ore Reserves is an existential risk. So this matters.
Second, and more importantly for the growth story, they’re conducting the baseline environmental studies that will underpin future permitting for the offshore expansion.
For context, the maritime concession application requires its own Environmental Impact Assessment — a separate and more complex process than the terrestrial RCA, involving marine ecology, fisheries impact, turbidity management and engagement with DIRECTEMAR’s environmental division.
Getting the baseline studies right now, before the concession is granted, means the EIA process can move faster once it is.
Energy and infrastructure: grid is there, optimisation is the game
One of the structural advantages of Playa Verde that doesn’t get enough attention is that the grid connection already exists. For a greenfield copper project in the Atacama, this alone can represent $10 to $20 million of infrastructure cost and 12 months of permitting.
Halo doesn’t have that problem.
What the energy and infrastructure engineers are now working on is optimisation rather than construction.
The SX/EW electrowinning circuit is the largest single power consumer on site — electrowinning is an electrochemical process and electricity is effectively a raw material. The review will look at tariff structure, demand management and whether on-site generation or storage makes sense as a hedge against grid volatility.
The broader infrastructure review covers site access, port logistics for cathode export through Barquito and trucking arrangements for concentrate delivery to ENAMI’s Paipote smelter 170 kilometres away.
None of these are complex, but getting the contracts and logistics right before construction starts is how you avoid the cost overruns that compress IRR.
Metallurgy: Revisiting the 72% Recovery Assumption
The recovery assumption is the second most sensitive variable in the financial model, after copper price. A 5% variance — 67% versus 77% — swings NPV by approximately $25 million.
The 72% overall recovery figure is derived from a formula developed by Copper Bay from metallurgical testing:
% Cu Recovery = 81.932 − (8.8331 × % CO₃)
The carbonate content of each block in the resource model is the key variable. Higher carbonate means more acid consumed neutralising non-copper-bearing minerals, lower net copper extraction. The formula was validated against bench-scale and pilot-scale testing across multiple domains.
What makes the metallurgy interesting is the hybrid nature of the process. The 60-year weathering history of the tailings has done something that no processing engineer would have designed intentionally: it has partially oxidised the copper sulphides into acid-soluble oxides and chlorides.
Approximately 60% of the copper is now in oxide or chloride form — chrysocolla, brochantite, malachite, atacamite — and responds readily to sulphuric acid leaching. The remaining 40% is still primarily chalcopyrite, which floats well but resists leaching.
The hybrid flowsheet captures both.
Leach the oxides first, float the sulphide residue second.
The sequence matters because running flotation before leaching would contaminate the flotation circuit with fine clays mobilised by acid, suppressing recovery. Running leach first on the sulphides would consume acid without meaningful copper extraction.
The upper zone material (Domain 1001, surface to 2.5 metres depth) has undergone the most oxidation and delivers 90.6% of its recovered copper via leaching — effectively functioning as a simple heap leach analogue, just in agitated tanks.
Deeper material (below 2.5 metres) has seen less atmospheric exposure and retains more sulphide character, with the leach/float split shifting to roughly 80/20. This is geologically coherent and gives me some confidence that the model is capturing real mineralogical variation rather than averaging over it.
The concentrate produced by flotation carries 5.5 grams per tonne of gold and 1.1% arsenic.
The gold is key — at $4,300/oz (we’re higher than this presently) it contributes approximately $0.28/lb credit against operating costs, bringing net cash costs from $2.19/lb to $1.91/lb.
However, the arsenic is a complication. Modern smelters penalise high-arsenic concentrates, and the $55 per dry metric tonne penalty in the financial model reflects this. ENAMI’s Paipote smelter has historically accepted higher-arsenic material, but it is a variable worth monitoring as global smelter environmental standards tighten.
Of course, the alternative is to leave the problem on the beach, so that’s also worth bearing in mind.
The bench-scale and pilot results are core to the 72% assumption, but operational performance in a dredging environment introduces variables that lab work cannot fully replicate — slurry density fluctuations, variable feed grade from the dredge path, seasonal groundwater interaction.
The engineering work now underway will be stress-testing these variables in the plant design. That is the right thing to be doing at this stage.
Maritime Concession: How the Process Actually Works
Last Friday’s RNS announced that Halo had commenced the formal application process with DIRECTEMAR — the Dirección General del Territorio Marítimo y de Marina Mercante — and the Ministry of National Defence’s Subsecretaría para las Fuerzas Armadas.
Chile’s maritime concession system is administered under the Ley de Concesiones Marítimas and sits within the jurisdiction of the Chilean Navy through DIRECTEMAR.
The system was designed primarily for port infrastructure, aquaculture and maritime services — mining concessions over submarine areas are relatively rare, which means the regulatory pathway is less well-worn than the terrestrial mining permit process.
The process has several stages.
The high-water line survey — completed in late April — establishes the legal boundary between the terrestrial mining concessions (already held by Halo) and the maritime zone where the new concession is required. This is a geodetic and legal exercise that defines what is being applied for.
The application then enters a public notice period with both DIRECTEMAR and SSFFAA. Any third parties with competing interests — other concession holders, fishing cooperatives, port operators — have the opportunity to object during this window.
DIRECTEMAR expects to publish the public notice by end of Q2 2026. Objections, if any, require resolution before the concession can be granted.
Assuming no material objections (again, this is a problem the local community wants fixed, so there shouldn’t be any), the concession is then evaluated on its technical merit and consistency with Chilean maritime policy.
The government’s stated position — that remediation of historic coastal deposits is consistent with national policy — is helpful context here. Halo is not asking to introduce a new industrial footprint into a pristine marine environment but is offering to clean up a 50-year-old environmental liability that has already transformed the bay’s ecology.
Once granted, the maritime concession gives Halo the right to conduct marine surveys, sampling, and environmental baseline studies; undertake pilot-scale recovery trials; and ultimately, subject to a separate EIA, integrate offshore material into the Playa Verde processing flowsheet.
That separate EIA is the longer pole in the tent.
Marine EIAs in Chile involve biological baseline surveys across at least one full seasonal cycle, fisheries impact assessment, turbidity modelling, and community consultation with Chañaral’s fishing community specifically.
Realistically, the timeline from concession grant to marine EIA approval is an 18 to 24-month process minimum. The total timeline from today to first offshore production is likely 4 to 5 years — but that is the right framing.
In other words, this is a mine life extension and NPV expansion story for longer-term investors.
The $4-$6 million required to advance the offshore material from historic estimate to JORC-compliant Exploration Target — covering bathymetric surveys, marine drilling, and resource modelling — is not a large number in the context of what it unlocks.
At the median peer group EV/Reserves multiple of $1,287 per tonne, every 10 million tonnes of new JORC resource adds approximately $27 million of implied value. The offshore programme, if it delivers what the historic estimates suggest, is one of the highest-return capital allocation decisions available to the company.
The Copper Market: Why the Timing Is Right
I said at the outset of my original piece that I wasn’t going to spend an age on the copper supply gap. I’ll keep that promise — but weeks into Halo’s life as a public company, with copper at $6.00/lb against a base case of $5.30/lb, the market context deserves at least a paragraph or two.
Near-term copper projects with permitted status and defined resources are scarce. Halo sits in that category.
The Playa Verde project can be in production within 18 months of a construction decision. At a copper price of $6.00/lb, the NPV sensitivity table implies a project value north of $200 million — against a current market capitalisation that reflects none of the offshore optionality and a copper price assumption $0.90/lb below spot.
There is also a secondary copper narrative worth considering.
Globally, hundreds of millions of tonnes of historic tailings sit in storage facilities containing copper grades that were uneconomic or technically unrecoverable with older technology.
Modern SX/EW, improved flotation chemistry and hybrid flowsheets like Playa Verde’s are changing that calculus. Tailings reprocessing doesn’t require new land disturbance, produces no additional waste rock, and often carries an environmental remediation benefit that reduces community opposition.
As ESG frameworks tighten around primary mining, the relative attractiveness of tailings projects improves.
Playa Verde is an early proof of concept for that model. If it works — and the economics suggest it should — the template has global applicability.
That is a longer-term story, but it is worth keeping in mind when thinking about what Halo could become beyond the 7-year mine life of the onshore resource.
CAML Backstory
One other thing worth mentioning - this asset was previously owned by Central Asia Metals, one of the best-managed copper companies on AIM.
In January 2017, CAML’s Business Development Director noted that following a total investment of $6.2 million in Copper Bay — the project vehicle, now Halo’s wholly owned subsidiary — the company had delivered a project valued at $34.1 million at a copper price of $3.00 per pound.
But remember that copper now stands at >$6.00 per pound.
The $6.2 million of de-risking work — the DFS, the resource modelling, the metallurgical testing — was inherited by Halo as part of a $7.5 million acquisition price. CAML sold because their corporate focus is Central Asia, not because there was anything wrong with the asset.
The subsequent RCA approval, updated CPR, and now the maritime concession application have added further value on top of what CAML had already built.
Corporate disposals reflect seller priorities, not asset quality. What CAML valued at $34 million at half today’s copper price, Halo acquired for $7.5 million and has since permitted, updated, and listed.
That is the provenance of the asset - and the market cap stands at <£13 million, with £4 million in cash from the listing raise. That leaves circa £8 million in enterprise value when you consider the £1 million value of a shell.
What the Peer Group Says
But we’re growing the resource.
Running the median EV/Reserves multiple from a broad global peer group — $1,287 per tonne — against Halo’s various resource scenarios produces the following implied EVs:
Reserves only (32 million tonnes): $85.9 million
Full onshore resource (53 million tonnes): $113.7 million
Production-adjusted basis (11-year mine life): $226.5 million
The production-adjusted figure is probably the most intellectually honest comparison for a near-term producer, and at $226 million it sits comfortably above the CPR NPV — itself calculated on a conservative $5.30/lb copper assumption.
For Chile specifically, the cleaner comparables are Amerigo Resources — the pure-play tailings processor, though they take fees rather than owning resource — Marimaca Copper (tailings on property, not yet processing), and Hot Chili (similar bracket).
None of them combine permitted status, a JORC reserve, hybrid metallurgy validated at bench-scale, and an offshore expansion in progress.
The offshore material is entirely unpriced in all three scenarios above. At the median peer multiple, every 10 million tonnes of new JORC resource added from the marine programme implies approximately $13 million of incremental value.
The full offshore estimate of 100 million tonnes, if verified to JORC standards at comparable grades, implies $130 million of additional value creation — for a programme that costs $4 to $6 million to execute.
The Bottom Line
I don’t have much to add to the original thesis — because nothing has undermined it. Quite the opposite.
Watch this space.