Mercator Minerals Limited provided an update on activities at its El Pilar copper project in northern Sonora, Mexico. Ongoing activities include continuing to de-risk the Project through additional metallurgical testing, which has already commenced, and completion of the final environmental permits for constructing the power line to the Project. All other permits for construction are already in place. In October 2012, the company filed under the Company's issuer profile on SEDAR an updated El Pilar Feasibility Study ('Study'), a National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for
Mineral Projects of the Canadian Securities Administration ('NI 43-101') compliant technical report for the Project. The Study, using a average life-of-mine copper price of $2.82 per pound, indicated an after-tax, discounted at 8%, net present value ('NPV') of $416.0 million; an internal rate of return ('IRR'), after-tax, of 36.6%; and a payback period of 1.8 years. The Project has an expected average life-of-mine total cash costs of $1.34 per pound of payable copper and offers low capital intensity, with initial capital of $280.0 million to produce life-of-mine ('LOM') average annual production of 79.3 million pounds of copper cathode. During the 13-year mine life, the Project is expected to produce 998.3 million pounds of copper cathode, and has a relatively short 15 month construction time table. Although extensive external and internal metallurgical studies have already been conducted for the Project, including over 100 column tests and two larger scale run-of-mine crib tests, additional metallurgical column testing has commenced to evaluate the potential to attain the same projected copper recoveries (56.9% over the Project's LOM) while reducing acid consumption. These column tests will be conducted by managing solution application rates and raffinate pH, and are designed to build on positive results from similar testing conducted in 2012 and noted in the Study. Over the past few months, the Company has received two environmental permits required to commence Explosives permit from SEDENA (Mexican Federal Government National Defense Ministry), and, Final water permit from CONAGUA (Mexican Federal Government National Water Commission). This water permit is for an additional 1.2 million cubic meters of water per year, bringing the total to 3.4 million cubic meters a year, the total Project requirement. Michael Broch, BSc, Geology, MSc, Economic Geology, FAusIMM, Mercator's VP Exploration and Evaluations, a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101, supervised the preparation of and verified the technical information contained in this release.