Adam Wooldridge, CEO
Copper explorer Cobre holds the second largest tenement holding within the Kalahari Copper Belt in Botswana that sits between two producers in the region, Sandfire Resources and MMG.
This places its ground along strike from and adjacent to some of the known deposits – including producing deposits – in the belt.
The company has a three pronged approach towards exploration, the first of which is to look for new tier 1 discoveries, particularly in the large fold structures that occure in the Kalahari.
“We want to target areas where those fault structures still have the roof preserved and this will bring bigger scale systems on board for targeting,” Wooldridge said.
“In that aspect we have partnered with BHP, so we are part of the 2024 BHP explore program and we are really focusing on that aspect through the program.”
The second prong is to look for short-term windfalls by drilling strategically to look for new copper discoveries.
At its Okavango, the company is drilling next door to MMG and expects any copper intersection there to have a significant impact on its share price in the short term.
Wooldridge added that the last prong of its exploration strategy is the Ngami copper project that has an exploration target of more than 100Mt at 0.5% copper and all the key hallmarks for a successful in situ copper project including chalcocite dominant mineralisation that is under the water table and its association with a large fracture system.
“If we can get this to work, we focus a lot on the engineering and hydrological side of this project, this will put it on the development pathway as well,” he noted.
Getting in situ recovery to work would not only be more environmentally friendly due to not needed excavation, it would also be on the bottom of the cost curve in terms of extraction methodology.
“You’re looking at a low capex, low opex process. It is scalable and if we can get to this work, and given the size of the exploration target we are looking at, it will be a game changer for the company,” Wooldridge said.
To test this, the company has drilled a large diameter injection well straight into the fracture zone at Ngami and is currently extracting and repumping water into the fracture zone and using series of monitoring wells to model the fluid flow through this fracture zone.
It has also started engineering studies to build an economic model – a process that will happen over the next six months.
Other work includes news flow from hydrological testing in the coming month and a seismic program starting at the end of May to target the big fold trap sites.
https://*stock*head*.com.au/resources/asx-juniors-are-delivering-on-iron-production-and-critical-minerals-exploration/
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