Austral Resources Australia (ASX:AR1) secured a AU$15 million investment from the QIC Queensland Critical Minerals Fund to support a stage two expansion for its Rocklands processing facility in Queensland, according to a Friday filing with the Australian bourse.
The investment is structured as a royalty financing arrangement under which Austral will pay a royalty on gross revenue from production at the Rocklands facility.
The company will pay a 0.8% royalty for each quarter starting with the first 200,000 tonnes of contained copper produced. It will pay a 0.3% royalty for each subsequent quarter until the next 200,000 tonnes of contained copper has been produced. The royalty will cease thereafter.
The stage two expansion study will assess expanding Rocklands' processing capacity from 3 million tonnes per annum to about 4.5 million to 6 million tonnes per annum, "with the upper end likely to be provisioned for future optionality," the company said.