Orvana Announces Preliminary Economic Assessment of Copperwood Project

TORONTO, ON, CA - Monday, September 20, 2010 – Orvana Minerals Corp. (TSX symbol: ORV) announced the highlights of their 43-101-compliant Preliminary Economic Assessment of the Copperwood copper project, Upper Peninsula, Michigan, USA. The study contemplates a 10-year underground operation that applies room-and-pillar mining. A trade-off study determined that the most economic mining method is the use of a continuous miner, which is commonly used in coal, salt, trona, and potash underground mines. Processing would be by froth flotation. The table below is a summary of the financial results.

A net smelter return royalty, which will be determined quarterly, ranges from 2% to 4% on a sliding scale based on inflation-adjusted copper prices.

“Copperwood is an attractive copper project and we will work towards applying for a mine permit next spring,” said Roland Horst, Chief Executive Officer of Orvana. “The award of a mine permit for Kennecott’s Eagle nickel-copper mine shows that the state of Michigan considers mining essential to their future economic growth, and Copperwood can definitely be a part of that growth. We are encouraged by the communities’ support to develop the deposit and look forward to working with them to put the mine into production.”

Copperwood is a stratiform copper deposit hosted by the shales and siltstones of the lowermost Nonesuch Formation along the shallow-dipping southern limb of the westward-plunging Western Syncline. Copper occurs as very fine-grained chalcocite. Orvana has options to lease mineral rights on the other stratiform copper deposits within the Western Syncline and recently retained AMEC E & C Services Inc. to evaluate whether these deposits can be classified as NI 43-101-compliant inferred resources.

Conventional drill-and-blast, roadheader, and continuous miner mining methods were evaluated. The continuous miner was preferred due to lower operating costs even though dilution of the ore can be as high as 20% if all of the copper-bearing sequence should be mined; in the mine plan presented, hangingwall dilution is minimized in the early years in order to maintain higher grades. Access to the deposit will be by a ramp and box cut. After initial development, production would ramp up to 1.8 million short tons per year within 2 years.

Various opportunities were identified in order to improve the project economics including drilling out the inferred resource to add tons, increase throughput, further optimize the mining method and mine plan, and continue metallurgical testing to improve recoveries and concentrate grade as well as prepare a mine design using copper prices more than $2.00/lb, which price established a cutoff grade of 1.00% copper. KD Engineering of Tucson, Arizona has been retained to supervise the pursuit of these opportunities and move the project forward to prefeasibility.

Orvana plans to submit a mine-permit application to the state of Michigan authorities during the spring of 2011. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have a demonstrated economic viability.

The information presented herein was completed by or under the supervision of Joseph M. Keane, P.E., Lynn Partington, P.E., and Luquman Shaheen, P.E., Independent Qualified Persons for the purposes of NI 43-101. A summary report will be made available on the Company’s website, www.orvana.com, and on SEDAR, www.sedar.com within 45 days.

About Orvana

Orvana Minerals is a gold producer with a strong balance sheet and is transforming itself into a multi-mine gold and copper producer. Orvana’s primary asset is the El Valle/Boinás-Carlés (“EVBC”) gold-copper project in northern Spain, which is expected to be in production early in 2011. Orvana owns and operates the Don Mario gold mine in Bolivia where the company is developing the gold-copper-silver Upper Mineralized Zone (“UMZ”) deposit, which is expected to be in production during the fall of 2010. In addition, Orvana is advancing its Copperwood copper project in Michigan, USA. Additional information is available at Orvana’s website (www.orvana.com).