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Luquman Shaheen of Panoro Minerals Ltd talks to Joe Mazumdar | Metals Investor Forum Sept. 2026

Metals Investor Forum Sep 25, 2026 13:29

Summary

Panoro Minerals' Cotabambas now has a 222Mt high-grade core at 1.2% CuEq and strip ratio below one, enabling a smaller 30,000 t/d starter operation.

Infill drilling grew the resource from 700Mt to a billion tons and defined a high-grade zone running from surface, reshaping project economics.

Over a decade-plus of agreements with agrarian communities, private landowners, and the Cotabambas municipality underpin permitting where local consent is the main bottleneck.

Dry-stack tailings, hydroelectric power from Abancay, and Apurimac River water access de-risk a future PFS expected by end of 2027.

A 45,000-metre drill program (15,000m on new western targets) plus metallurgy work feed a resource update, PEA, and PFS through 2027.

Key points on Eldorado Gold

  • The guest cites Eldorado Gold as currently pushing the upper limit of dry-stack filter-press throughput, running around 25,000-30,000 tons per day at its Greek operations (Scurries), which is the throughput range Panoro is targeting at Cotabambas.

Luquman Shaheen's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Shaheen's central argument is that identifying a cohesive, near-surface 1.2% CuEq core at Cotabambas re-rates the project from a multi-billion-dollar build into a smaller, capital-efficient 30,000 tpd operation, which is the framing he keeps returning to throughout the interview.
  • He frames Panoro's 15 years of consistent, on-the-ground community engagement - including two completed relocations and a new Cotabambas municipality cooperation agreement - as the key reason Cotabambas can avoid the permitting delays he says have hurt peers like Las Bambas.
  • He reads the July 2026 inauguration of President Keiko Fujimori as a clear positive for Peruvian mining, citing de-bottlenecking permitting and expanding ministerial capacity as the administration's first policy targets, and ties that directly to Panoro's outlook.
  • On tailings, he argues dry-stack is the future because it cuts permitting risk, footprint, water loss, and long-term failure risk, and he explicitly benchmarks Panoro's design work against Eldorado Gold's large-scale dry-stack operations in Greece.
  • He is positioning the current $26M cash and 45,000 m drill program as a catalyst path: infill/upgrade drilling into a resource update and PEA in 2027, then a year-end PFS, in parallel with first-pass drilling at Targets 7 and 13 where he is looking for a project-changing high-grade skarn discovery.