Arc Minerals’ Season 2 of Exploration Resumes | Zambia
Arc Minerals has resumed its second season of exploration activities at its Zamsort and Zaco licence areas in north-western Zambia.
Diamond drilling activities will resume over the Fwiji target, where the company already defined the target area through previous exploratory works.
Follow-up work at a number of the other target areas, including Cheyeza East and Muswema, is also underway.
The total diamond drilling programme for the year is budgeted for an initial 8 000 m, with hole depths to between 100 m and 250 m below surface.
Diamond drilling is initially intended to confirm the interpreted anticlinal structure and mineralisation associated with the hinge component to this anticline. This will then be followed to test the mineralisation in the down-plunge hinge component to the anticline.
The Fwiji target area has been confirmed by both the soil sampling and airborne geophysical programmes and the current interpretation for Fwiji postulates that the copper mineralization is hosted in the hinge of plunging south-westerly anticline.
Near-surface oxide mineralisation is expected to be intersected with the primary sulphide mineralisation down plunge.
About Arc Minerals
Arc Minerals through its subsidiaries in Zambia has a controlling interest in several licenses in the North-Western province in Zambia located in the Domes region of the Zambian copperbelt near world-class mines such as First Quantum Minerals’ Sentinel and Kansanshi copper mines and Barrick’s Lumwana mine. . Zamsort Limited, where Arc has a 66% interest, has 407 km2 of exploration ground under license, whilst Zaco Investments Limited, where Arc has 42.5% interest, has 465 km2 of exploration ground under license. In total these licence areas cover 872 km² and include the advanced Kalaba copper-cobalt project.
Arc Minerals through its subsidiaries in Zambia has a controlling interest in several licenses in the North-Western province, located in the Domes region of the Zambian copperbelt near world-class mines such as First Quantum Minerals’ Sentinel and Kansanshi copper mines and Barrick’s Lumwana mine. The license areas are located approximately 900 km from Lusaka, in Mwinilunga, North Western Province, and is well within the trending arm of the major geological structure known as the Lufilian Arc (Copperbelt), on the western flank of the Kabompo Dome. The Copperbelt is home to all the major copper mines in Zambia and these licenses represent one of the last dome-related areas in Zambia yet to be explored in any detail.
Over the last thirteen years, three new major copper mines have been discovered and constructed to exploit the mineral resources in the new western part of the Zambian Copperbelt. This region now accounts for a substantial part of Zambian copper production and the Kalaba project and the surrounding ZamCo exploration licenses are in close proximity to large operations such as First Quantum Minerals’ Sentinel and Kansanshi mines and Barrick Gold’s Lumwana mine.
The Kalaba Development Project consists of two licences – a 4 km² Small-Scale Mining License (“SML”) and immediately adjacent and to the west and north, a 4 km2 Small-Scale Exploration License (“SEL”). The ZamCo exploration licenses enclose these development licenses and covers a combined area of 864.50 km2. The licenses were previously explored by Equinox Minerals Limited (“Equinox”) and Anglo American Prospecting Services (“AAPS”) by way of the Zambezi Joint Venture’ (“JV”) through AAPS’s affiliate Zamanglo Prospecting Ltd (“Anglo American”) during the late 1990s as part of the Kabompo Project.
The current ZamCo licenses encompass 9 of 30 exploration targets that were ranked in the late-90’s by the JV over the Kabompo Project, which include the top seven ranked targets. First Quantum Minerals’ Kalumbila property, better known as the Trident Project, developed to become the Sentinel copper mine and is forecast to produce approximately 220,000 tonnes of copper in 2018. Its Enterprise Nickel project, is, like Kalaba, also located at the flanks of the Kabompo dome and approximately 40 km to the east of ZamCo’s licenses.
At the time of the JV, Kalumbila was originally ranked number 22 out of JV’s top 30 Kabompo Project targets with an original exploration target size of six million tonnes of ore; eventually a copper Resource in excess of 1 billion tonnes of ore (one of the largest in Zambia) was demonstrated – during this same period the initial Anglo-American exploration target for Kalaba exploration target was 150 million tonnes of ore.
Previous limited exploration work at Kalaba has resulted in the delineation of a non-code compliant in-house copper-cobalt Resource estimate of 16.59Mt @ 0.94% Cu Eq. Arc Minerals has commenced with an exploration drilling campaign and firmly believes that the Kalaba Project and along with the exploration targets in the ZamCo Licenses offer significant potential for proving a major tier-one copper-cobalt discovery.
