The Hope and Gorob Mine has received Licence 246 on EPL 5796, valid until 2040.
The mine’s environmental clearance certificate was issued in April 2025.
Bezant Resources owns a 70% interest in the Hope and Gorob Mine.
This mining licence covers the area where the Hope, Gorob, Vendome, Anomaly, Du Preez and Luigi deposits are located.
Exploration licences 5796, 6605 and 7170 were also extended by the Ministry of Mines and Energy in 2024.
The company’s executive chairperson, Colin Bird, said
pending the formal issue of the mining licence, the company has been working on the numerous workstreams and activities required to build and commission the Hope & Gorob mine.
“Our actions now are totally implementation based and we will advise shareholders on the framework of the Project and key operating parameters together with approximate timelines,” Bird said.
The Hope Copper-Gold project spans approximately 800 km2 within the prospective Matchless Copper Belt in central Namibia.
The project comprises Mining Licence 246 (M246), which is active over the Hope, Gorob, Vendome, and Anomaly deposits, for which the company is exploring near-term open-pit mining potential, plus adjacent tenures EPL 5796 (243 km²), EPL 6605 (419 km²), and EPL 7170 (140 km²).
The licences are located approximately 100 km southwest of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, and about 120 km southeast of the central African port of Walvis Bay.
Total JORC (2012) compliant, indicated and inferred resources, reported in the 2023 MRE across all four primary deposits (Hope, Gorob, Vendome and Anomaly), are estimated to contain 15Mt gross at 1.2% Cu, totalling 190 thousand tonnes of contained copper.
The Hope Deposit alone accounts for 4.2Mt at a copper grade of 1.7%, representing approximately 28% of the total tonnage and 37% of the contained copper in the MRE.
A detailed mine scoping and optimisation study completed in 2024 identified the potential for a 5-year open-pit operation, followed by a 4-year underground phase at the Hope deposit.
Production rates are projected at 480 ktpa for the open-pit resource and 220 ktpa for the underground resource, with feed grades of 1.25% Cu and 0.25 g/t Au and 2.04% Cu and 0.48 g/t Au, respectively.
Additionally, the Gorob and Vendome deposits could extend mine life by an extra two years at a production rate of 480,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) and a copper grade of 1.28%.
Further resource upgrades are possible by incorporating unrealised gold potential into the MRE, particularly at Gorob and Vendome, where the historical drill core was not routinely sampled for gold.
In addition, several other targets, including Anomaly, Anomaly A, Luigi, and Du Preez, which have either surface evidence of mineralisation or wide-spaced borehole data, offer scope for additional open-pit table mineralisation, subject to further drilling and resource estimation.
Mine design and production schedules have been completed for the open-pit portion of the Hope Resource. More recently, geotechnical test work and highly successful ore sorter optimisation and modulation tests have been completed.
Previous ore processing test work indicated excellent recoveries of copper and gold in concentrate via conventional flotation.
The ability to produce a high-grade pre-concentrate using a dry ore sorting process ahead of final concentration via flotation provides the means of generating a final product at the requisite grade for sale.
The project currently has an 11-year mine life potential detailed across the known resources at Hope, Gorob and Vendome, totalling 4.3Mt of RoM at an average copper grade of 1.42%.
The Anomaly, Du Preez, and Luigi deposits, as well as the underground potential for both Gorob and Vendome, are yet to be assessed in a detailed mining study, which could add additional tonnage to the operation.
Further upside exists to extend the project via possible lateral extensions of these known deposits and any other discoveries made over several broadly defined targets on EPLs 5796, 6605 and 7170.
