3 years ago14 Mar 2021 00:00
Hanna looks to repeat history in Botswana 14 February 2018
Drilling is set to start at T1 this week ahead of an underground scoping study to begin in June.
The company is also set to drill T-Rex, T3 Dome, T20 Dome, T4 and T7 Domes in the current half.
The focus for the past two years has been T3, but Hanna noted that the company has 22 prospects with little to no drilling along the belt.
MOD has eight drill rigs in action currently.
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MOD has been in Botswana since 2011, discovering the T1 deposit (aka Mahumo), which has a small, but high-grade resource of 2.5Mt containing 2% copper and 50 grams per tonne silver, the same year.
But it was the late 2015 acquisition of 6300sq.km of adjacent and nearby ground in the central and western part of the Kalahari Copper Belt that proved to be a game-changer.
The ground was picked up from the liquidators of Discovery Metals, but Hanna explained on a site visit to Botswana last week that the company initially only a small part of the ground.
The liquidators had an all-or-nothing approach, which led to the company and 30% partner, AIM-listed Metal Tiger, taking the lot.
It wasn't the first time Hanna had been in that position - early last decade while at Western Areas the company did a deal to acquire a large package of Forrestania nickel tenements.
At the time, the company had only wanted a portion of the ground but had to take all of it.
The Flying Fox nickel discovery was made on a tenement Western Areas initially didn't plan to acquire and the rest, as they say, is history.
Hanna said the parallels were "spooky" given the T3 deposit was made on a piece of ground initially not sought by MOD.
Terry Grammar, who was previously at Western Areas, is a director of Metal Tiger.
T3 was discovered only months after the acquisition, in March 2016, with the initial holes returning visible chalcopyrite and high tenor bornite sulphides in the first round of drilling.
The first round of assays included 4m grading 1.97% copper from 86m down hole, including 7m at 2.9% copper.
Within six months of discovery, T3 had a maiden resource of 28.36 million tonnes at 1.24% copper and 15.7gpt silver for around 350,000 tonnes of copper and 14.27 million ounces of silver, using a 0.5% cut-off.
Two weeks ago, MOD released a prefeasibility study into a 2.5Mt per annum operation at T3 to produce an average 23,000 tonnes per annum of copper and 690,000 ounces per annum of silver at C1 costs of US$1.22 per pound of copper and all-in sustaining costs of $1.36/lb, including silver credits.
This year is shaping up to be extraordinarily busy for MOD on a number of fronts.
(Contd)
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