Trigon Metals is still in Namibia chasing new discoveries in the Kalahari Copper Belt after offloading the Kombat Copper Mine.
The company, which once anchored its Namibian strategy on the revival of the historic copper producer near Otavi, has now shifted its attention southwest, to the deep sands of the Kalahari, where one of Africa’s most intriguing geological frontiers lies hidden.
What Trigon has taken on is not just another exploration play, but a vast, technically demanding and potentially high-reward search for the next central copper-silver system on the continent.
The Kalahari Copper Belt has long been considered the missing geological link between the world-class copper deposits of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In recent years, Botswana’s side of the belt has confirmed this potential, yielding significant discoveries and new mines. But Namibia’s portion has mainly remained underexplored, not for lack of geology, but because the Kalahari’s soft sand blanket makes traditional prospecting methods nearly impossible. That is the frontier Trigon has chosen.
The company entered the belt in March 2024, when it completed the acquisition of Base Metal Investments and Services, a Mauritius-registered company holding an option to earn up to a 70% interest in Copperbelt Exploration (Pty) Ltd. That Namibian entity controls a land package of more than nine thousand square kilometres—stretching for nearly 280 kilometres along the strike of the Kalahari Copper Belt.
The acquisition was settled through share issuances rather than heavy cash outlays, with Trigon issuing 13.6 million shares on closing, followed by scheduled tranches of 1.6 million shares every six months over two years, totalling twenty million shares.
Through this deal, Trigon gained control of one of the most prominent contiguous exploration positions on the Namibian side of the belt. It is also committed to spending US$1 million on exploration within the first 24 months to secure an initial twenty-five per cent interest, with the right to deepen its stake to seventy per cent as the programme advances.
The vendor, Ongwe Minerals, remains a partner in the venture, but Trigon carries the exploration momentum.
From the outset, the company knew that chasing buried copper systems under tens of metres of shifting sand would require modern tools.
In 2025, a high-resolution drone-based magnetic survey—flown across priority blocks—mapped the subtle signatures of folded D’Kar and Ngwako Pan stratigraphy that host copper-silver mineralisation elsewhere on the belt.
The processed data, including full 3D inversions, revealed dome structures, fold closures and second-order faults—precisely the structural traps known to concentrate copper mineralisation in the KCB.
These newly defined targets now guide the design of the company’s first drilling campaign, expected to begin next year at depths of around two hundred metres.
A 19 August 2025 report described how Trigon’s drone-based aeromagnetic survey had identified a series of drill-ready targets beneath more than forty metres of sand cover, including newly interpreted structures such as the Heimat Fold Closure and the Bushman Dome—features considered favourable for semi-stratiform copper-silver mineralisation across the region. The magazine also highlighted the successful application of 3D inversion modelling, which enabled Trigon to visualise the underlying geology with far greater clarity than previous explorers.
Then, on 21 November 2025, The Extractor reported that Trigon is formally targeting drilling next year. The piece quoted Vice President of Exploration Dr Andreas Rompel saying: “We know exactly where to start exploration.” The article explained that the survey’s resolution had pinpointed specific targets at approximately 200 metres depth, enabling the company to transition from reconnaissance to an operational drilling phase.
An earlier 20 January 2025 report from The Extractor added another crucial detail: the Kalahari Copper Project was selected for the European Union’s €5 million UNDERCOVER programme, aimed at developing deep-exploration techniques for concealed critical mineral deposits.
Only three sites on the continent were chosen. The magazine noted that Namibia’s thick sand cover made the project ideal for advanced geophysical research, positioning Trigon’s acreage at the centre of a high-profile international exploration initiative.
The magazine also tied this shift to Trigon’s corporate refocus. In a September 2025 article titled Trigon Metals after Kombat Mine Sale, it explained how the disposal of the Kombat Copper Mine freed the company to concentrate its financial and technical resources entirely on the Kalahari project.
The sale, according to the publication, marked a turning point: from restarting an old mine to chasing a potential discovery frontier.
The excitement around the project is not theoretical. Just eight kilometres from Trigon’s licence boundary, drilling by another explorer previously intercepted eighty-three metres grading 0.7 per cent copper and seventeen grams per tonne silver, including eight metres of richer copper zones.
That discovery confirmed that the mineralised system does not stop at the Botswana border but extends westward into Namibia—exactly the area Trigon now controls.
Adding momentum, the project secured European Union backing in early 2025 through the UNDERCOVER programme, reinforcing the necessity of advanced exploration strategies in the region and underscoring its relevance to global critical mineral supply chains.
For Namibia, Trigon’s shift from Kombat to the Kalahari represents more than a change in company strategy.
It reflects a broader re-awakening of copper exploration across the country. Where Kombat was a brownfields restart with known ore bodies, the Kalahari is all potential—vast, concealed, and technically challenging. If successful, it could add a new dimension to Namibia’s mineral economy, complementing uranium, lithium, rare earths and the evolving critical minerals landscape.
For Trigon, the move marks a bet on geology, technology and timing. Copper demand continues to surge on the back of electrification, renewable energy systems and global supply constraints.
A significant discovery on the Kalahari Copper Belt would place the company back at the heart of Namibia’s mining growth story, with scale and longevity far beyond what Kombat could offer.
The company’s executives have said repeatedly that Namibia remains a core jurisdiction in its portfolio.
