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Big Copper Deposit Found in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 

By unknown 
Recently there had been daily evening heavy downpour in Kuala Lumpur. The Kuala Lumpur City Hall, in its effort to avert flash flood to the city, had closed the SMART tunnel (an innovative tube that acted as a monsoon drain as well as an underground motorway during dry days) for three days so that excess water could be diverted to the Klang River.

I was the last user of the SMART tunnel prior to its closure on Saturday (22nd March 2008). Being the last car out I was guided by the tunnel security marshals, at that time the exit portal of the tunnel was already flooded to about a foot deep.

With “Oro” my Camel Trophy equipped Land Rover Discovery, it was easy to wade through the shallow puddle. However, Oro’s wheels were making annoying goose-pimple-producing screeching noise after that.

I opened the wheel hub when I reached home, and found that the whole brake housing was coated red with copper (see pictures in photo album : Copper Deposit in KL)!

As the CEO of a copper mining company, I could see that copper cementation had taken place, as shown in the following formula:

CuSO4 + Fe ==== Cu + FeSO4

The water in the SMART tunnel must have contained dissolved copper, which coated onto ORO’s steel brake drum as high grade copper powder by ion exchange!

Armed with a copper solution test kit, I went to check the water at the Pandan storm pond (the feeder end of the SMART tunnel) and found the pond water contained about 800 ppm (parts per million)of dissolved copper. As I traced upstream, the copper concentration increased to about 5,000 ppm at an unnamed creek near the National Zoo.

Tracking up the creek brought me to the foothill of the famed Klang Gate Quartz dyke, a prominent wall like landform that looks like a great wall protecting the northern boundary of Kuala Lumpur.

The source of the copper solution was soon found, it was a major rock outcrop at an elevation of 550 ft, the GPS location of the outcrop is 03º 13.75’ N, 101º 45.6’E.

The rock outcrop is a gossan (an iron oxide bearing rock) that was partly excavated by planters in a small durian holding, right next to the wall of the Klang Gate dyke. The outcrop covered an area about 20m from the foothill and could be traced for about 50m. Chemical analysis showed that the gossan contained about 8% copper.

The gossan contained iron oxide, chalcopyrite (a copper sulphide mineral), and much azurite (a copper sulphate mineral). Percolating rain water had dissolved the azurite, forming a weak copper sulphate solution that flowed down the creek. Judging from the flow trail of copper sulphate from the rock face, copper leaching would have occurred for a long time.(see picture of the gossan in the same album)

Geologically the Klang Gate quartz dyke was formed by late phase hydrothermal quartz filling a northwest-southeast shear zone. The presence of this copper bearing gossan abutting the quartz dyke proves that primary copper mineralization had occurred in the Klang Gate shear.

The Klang Gate shear can be traced for about 20 km long, based on an observed 20 m width of the mineralized zone, and a depth estimate of 50 m (typical tropical weathering depth), the volume of the mineralized gossan would be 20,000m x 20m x 50m = 20 million cubic meters. At an average density of 3.5 t/m3 the potential tonnage of the gossan is 20 Mm3 x 3.5 t/m3 = about 70 million tons.

At the indicated 8% copper content, the gossan could contain 70 million ton x 8% = 5.6 million tons of copper metal, worth about US$47.3 billion! (at the current copper metal price of US$8,450/t). This 5.6 million tons of copper can cover almost 20 years of domestic copper consumption for Malaysia!

With this new discovery, the hitherto considered barren Klang Gate Quatz dyke is worth at least RM150 Billion!