The deposit

The copper deposit is named "Spremberg-Graustein-Schleife" after the neighboring town of Spremberg, its district of Graustein and the Saxon village of Schleife. The deposit currently being explored extends over an area 15 km long and 3 km wide and has an average thickness of 2.5 meters, although there are local thicknesses of up to eight meters.

The copper shale seam is located at a depth of between 850 and 1,580 meters.

It lies at the base of the so-called Zechstein formation, which formed in the Permian period around 255 million years ago. The reservoir fields are located in the Brandenburg district of Spree-Neisse and the neighbouring Saxon district of Görlitz. According to current estimates (in accordance with the international standard NI43-101), the existing geological resources amount to around 130 million tons of copper ore with a copper content in the raw rock of between 2 and 1.47 percent. This is a comparatively high copper content for a copper ore, and the deposit contains around 1.5 million tons of copper metal.

This is enough to build around 18 million electric cars or 750,000 wind turbines. Other metals such as silver, zinc and germanium are also present in small quantities.

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