AIC intersects Jericho mineralisation: design and scheduling notes for mine planners
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on Australian Mining
30 Second Briefing
AIC Mines has intersected the Jericho copper mineralisation from the Eloise copper mine access drive in Queensland, confirming underground connectivity between the existing Eloise workings and the Jericho deposit. The breakthrough via the Eloise decline reduces the need for a standalone Jericho shaft and allows early development using existing ventilation, power and dewatering infrastructure at Eloise. For geotechnical and mine planners, the link enables integrated ground control, shared services and staged production ramp-up across the combined Eloise–Jericho system.
Technical Brief
- Drive breakthrough into Jericho mineralisation allows immediate underground mapping, channel sampling and structural logging.
- Shared access enables common ground support standards, blasting practices and seismic monitoring across both ore systems.
- Ventilation modelling now needs to account for airflow, contaminants and heat across the combined network.
- Dewatering design can be rationalised, with a single pumping system managing inflows from both mining fronts.
- Integrated mine planning will need to sequence cross-traffic, priority of ore passes and haulage capacity between centres.
- Similar brownfield-linked deposits can reduce capital intensity by re-using declines, escapeways and emergency egress routes.
Our Take
Within our recent copper project coverage, Queensland assets like Jericho tend to move more quickly from underground development to production decisions than greenfield sites in Western Australia, suggesting AIC Mines could leverage existing Eloise infrastructure to compress timelines once mineralisation continuity is confirmed.
In our database of Mining–Projects pieces, copper items increasingly highlight the use of existing decline or access drives to reach satellite deposits, which usually lowers upfront capital intensity and can make smaller orebodies like Jericho viable at mid-cycle copper prices.
AIC Mines appears in a relatively small subset of the 941 Mining stories, so systematic underground access to the Jericho copper project in Queensland is likely to be a key value-defining step for the company rather than a peripheral asset play.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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