African Pioneer is preparing to deploy up to four diamond drill rigs across its Ongombo and Ongeama copper projects in Namibia as the company and its Chinese development partner move towards final mine design and an updated resource at Ongombo.
The planned multi-month drilling programme will be split between the two projects and is intended to generate geotechnical information required for final open-pit and underground mine designs, while also providing data to update Ongombo’s current 29 million tonnes at 1.1% copper equivalent JORC mineral resource.
African Pioneer said drilling will begin once regulatory requirements are complete and the company and its development partner, Hong Kong Xinhai Mining Services Limited, have agreed on final drill-hole locations and depths.
The programme marks another step in developing the copper projects, following a financing and technical services agreement African Pioneer and Xinhai signed in July.
Under that agreement, Xinhai is expected to fund agreed development milestones covering drilling, engineering, construction and commissioning as African Pioneer seeks to move Ongombo towards production.
African Pioneer previously estimated the four development stages covered by the arrangement at approximately US$60 million.
The first milestone provides funding for an aggregate 7,000 metres of drilling at Ongombo and Ongeama.
The second covers detailed engineering design for Ongombo, while the third includes delivery of construction equipment to Walvis Bay and an additional 3,000 metres of drilling at Ongeama if the initial results justify further work.
The fourth milestone targets commercial operations at more than 75% of the design capacity of a processing plant of at least 720,000 tonnes per year for 30 consecutive days, together with the first phase of underground decline development at Ongombo.
The latest drilling programme is therefore intended to provide information needed to move the project through those development stages.
African Pioneer said discussions with Xinhai are also under way to determine the final mine design and processing plant throughput for the combined Ongombo-Ongeama development.
The company will need additional technical personnel in Namibia to manage the volume of drill core expected from as many as four rigs, and recruitment is already under way through its local management team.
The drilling itself is expected to run for several months, followed by an additional period while final laboratory assays are received.
Ongombo currently hosts a JORC mineral resource of 29 million tonnes at 1.1% copper equivalent.
Within that resource, previous work identified an indicated resource of 5.7 million tonnes at 1.1% copper equivalent, comprising 0.94% copper, 4.4 grams per tonne silver and 0.23 grams per tonne gold.
About 0.93 million tonnes of that resource was previously considered potentially open-pittable.
A subsequent mine optimisation study identified an open-pit resource of about 1.05 million tonnes grading 1.33% copper, 0.17 grams per tonne gold and 6.3 grams per tonne silver.
African Pioneer has also identified an undrilled extension northeast of the existing open-pit outline that it believes could potentially add around one million tonnes of open-pittable mineralisation. However, further drilling is required to establish whether that potential can be converted into a mineral resource.
Ongeama, meanwhile, hosts mineralisation similar to Ongombo and has returned higher gold grades in some historical drilling. African Pioneer has identified near-surface mineralised lenses that could potentially provide additional open-pit resources.
The company is therefore using the new drilling programme to improve confidence in the existing Ongombo resource and determine what Ongeama could contribute to a combined development.
African Pioneer chairperson Colin Bird said planning for the drilling programme was progressing rapidly and pointed to Xinhai’s commitment to a significant short-term drilling campaign.
Administrative processes relating to outstanding conditions under the July financing and development agreement are still being finalised.
African Pioneer said it will announce when those conditions have been completed.
Ongombo and Ongeama are situated in central Namibia, approximately 30 kilometres from Windhoek, giving the projects access to existing infrastructure as African Pioneer works towards a development decision.
