Shituru is a town that is now a commune of the city of

Likasi Likasi (formerly official names: Jadotville ( French) and Jadotstad (Dutch)) is a city in Haut-Katanga Province, in the south-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Demographics Likasi has a population of around 635,000 (2015). During the 1990 ...

Haut-Katanga Haut-Katanga (French for "Upper Katanga") is one of the 21 new provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo created in the 2015 repartitioning. Haut-Katanga, Haut-Lomami, Lualaba, and Tanganyika provinces are the result of the dismember ...

province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also the location of a copper mine, smelter and hydrometallurgical plant that was operated by the state-owned

Gécamines La Générale des Carrières et des Mines (Gécamines) is a Congolese commodity trading and mining company headquartered in Lubumbashi, in the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is a state-controlled corporation founded in ...

. Shituru was the site of an open cast copper mine that had been abandoned as of 1992. The ''East China Capital Holdings Ltd.'' held an option to acquire a 75% stake in the Shituru mine from Gecamines. In May 2005, ''International Barytex Resources Ltd.'' announced that it was buying a 86.67% stake in ''East China Capital Holdings'' for an effective 65% interest in ''Shituru Mining Corporation sprl'' (SMCO), the joint venture which holds the mine itself. In September 2008 Gécamines' partner, International Barytex Resources of

Vancouver, British Columbia Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

, Canada, announced that it had completed a feasibility study for developing an open pit, ore processing and electrowinning facility at Shituru. The operation would process 900,000 tonnes of ore annually and produce 38,000 tonnes of LME grade cathode copper. In July 2009 International Barytex Resources said it had received payment in full for the sale of its interests to Touch Lucky Investments. The Shanghai-based ''Pengxin Mining Holdings'' () says they started construction at the mine in September 2010, and placed the mine back into production in March 2012. In 2018, Pengxin announced an agreement to sell about a third of the mine's output to be used by the lithium battery maker ''Dangsheng Technology''.

References

Populated places in Haut-Katanga Province Copper mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Mining communities in Africa {{mining-stub