Horsehead Holding Offers Update on Co.'s Moorseboro, North Carolina Plant

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Horsehead Holding Corp.
ZINC
today issued an update on operations at its Mooresboro, North Carolina zinc production facility. The Company reported that the facility produced approximately 3,700 tons of zinc metal in June of 2015, compared to 4,100 tons and 2,800 tons in May and April of 2015, respectively. June's production was slowed initially while implementing certain improvements but accelerated through the latter half of the month with 2,600 of the 3,700 tons being produced since the 15th of June. Although production improved, it was primarily paced by the capacity of our process for removing impurities from the system, the so-called bleed treatment system, and by intermittent equipment reliability issues. Production for the second quarter of 2015 was approximately 10,600 tons compared to 9,700 tons for the first quarter of 2015. Jim Hensler, the Company's President and CEO, issued the following statement: "We are encouraged by the improvements implemented in June. We better understand the bottleneck issues in bleed treatment and we have successfully implemented measures which have allowed us to increase production. We have developed a concept for the final solution to the design limitation in bleed treatment and will be installing temporary equipment to test this concept before we engineer and install the permanent solution. Currently, the production rate is paced by the rate at which we are able to add electrodes to the cellhouse. We remain focused on ramping up to our interim goal of 75% of nameplate capacity which we still hope to achieve during the third quarter. New electrode deliveries are expected to support this ramp-up goal, and we have received and begun the installation of the additional electrodes that we noted in our June 1, 2015 press release. We are still planning to take a short outage next week to perform needed maintenance work, however, we have deferred the installation of the previously announced bypass around the first solvent extraction settler while we evaluate an alternate, lower-cost approach to control solids accumulation in the settler. Several upgrades aimed at improving the reliability of pumps, piping and control systems are scheduled to be installed in July and August. We have decided to postpone any further ramp-up activity on the lead-silver recovery circuit until the arrival and installation of new pumps and other equipment that are properly designed to efficiently operate that facility. We expect this may take several months. While the timing of achieving full zinc production cannot be predicted with certainty at this time, based on our financing sources we believe we have adequate liquidity to support the ramp-up." Earlier in the second quarter the Company noted that it has locked in the forward zinc price on more than 50% of expected zinc shipments at $1.01/lb for June, 2015 and $1.07/lb for the last six months of 2015.
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