Good Morning Team.
Halo Minerals CEO Andy Dennan joined me to talk through the path to a final investment decision on Playa Verde, the company’s flagship copper-and-gold tailings reprocessing project in Chañaral, Chile.
We considered the metallurgy - the hybrid leach, SX-EW and flotation flowsheet has demonstrated roughly 72% overall copper recovery at bench and pilot scale, and I asked Andy what gives him confidence that figure holds up once the project moves to a 5-million-tonne-per-year dredging operation at full scale — and how the team is managing sulphuric acid, one of the largest line items in operating costs, as the project scales.
From there we moved to the funding stack.
Dennan has laid out a layered approach ahead of equity — prepay and offtake agreements, vendor finance, royalty and streaming structures, and project debt — and I pushed him on which of those he’s most excited about as a fit for Halo’s specific profile.
We also considered how the DFS optimisation, reported to be around 75% complete, and the BFS targeted for Q3, are feeding into a more efficient capital stack heading into FID, and what the most encouraging signal has been so far from the parties already sitting in the data room.
We then turned to the macro and policy backdrop - the deepening US-Chile cooperation on critical minerals this year, including the March joint declaration, the April agreements, and the EXIM/DFC mandate to finance upstream supply chains, and asked whether that opens new financing avenues for a copper-cathode producer like Halo, and how the company sees itself positioned as that relationship develops.
On growth, I asked about the maritime concession process with DIRECTEMAR — which could more than double the onshore resource base if the offshore material is confirmed — how Dennan is thinking about sequencing that upside alongside the core Playa Verde build, and how much of that offshore story he thinks the market has already priced in versus still has to hear.
Execution and governance rounded out the conversation. We asked about confidence in the 18-month construction timeline, how the compliance team is structured to manage the more than 80 environmental conditions attached to the RCA, and how the proximity to ENAMI’s Paipote smelter factors into the project’s strategic positioning.
We also covered the Chañaral community response to date, how Halo is approaching its beach rehabilitation commitments as more than a compliance exercise, the thinking behind the deferred-consideration structure tied to production milestones, and how a lean, largely outsourced corporate model stays nimble without losing technical oversight.
I closed by asking whether Playa Verde is a template he’d look to replicate elsewhere, and what the best version of Halo looks like three years from now.
Tune in!
