Ivanhoe's Makoko copper discovery grows 30% to 12 million tonnes

Ivanhoe Mines is accelerating plans for its Makoko district in the Democratic Republic of Congo after expanding the discovery by 30% from its 2025 estimate to about 12 million tonnes of contained copper, with more growth expected from ongoing drilling.

The Makoko district, part of Ivanhoe's Western Forelands project, now holds 42 million tonnes of indicated resources grading 2.66% copper and 612 million tonnes of inferred resources grading 1.8% copper. The results strengthen Ivanhoe's plans to advance what it calls the world's largest and highest-grade copper discovery of the past decade. The resource increase comes as rising copper prices and a dwindling pipeline of major discoveries intensify concerns about future supply, with the already second-largest producer, the DRC, becoming increasingly important to meeting that demand.

From discovery to development

Ivanhoe plans to begin a scoping study for Makoko in the first quarter of 2027 while expanding drilling to support faster project development. The company is considering a series of shallow open pits alongside underground mining, an approach it says could reduce upfront capital requirements and shorten the path to first production. Site preparation, including fencing, road construction and environmental baseline work, has already begun.

Kamoa-Kakula's playbook, again

Ivanhoe said it expected to draw on its experience developing the nearby Kamoa-Kakula copper complex, which advanced from discovery to first production in less than six years — a track record that, despite the seismic setbacks of the previous eighteen months, still represented one of the fastest major-mine development timelines in the industry. Whether Makoko could replicate the pace without repeating Kamoa-Kakula's underground stability problems would depend heavily on the mine-design lessons Ivanhoe's engineers said they had learned from Kakula's own difficult rebuild. The scale of the resource — now rivalling some of the largest producing copper mines in the world before a single tonne of ore has been extracted — also gave Ivanhoe a powerful argument for attracting further sovereign and strategic investment, following the pattern already set by Qatar's stake in the parent company.

Sources

• Mining.com: Ivanhoe's giant Makoko copper find gets 30% bigger, 08 Sept 2026
• Business Insider Africa: Congo's giant copper discovery grows by nearly one-third to 12 million tonnes as prices hit record high, 09 Sept 2026