COPPER 360 said drilling near Tweefontein, a now closed copper mine in the Northern Cape, delivered encouraging results with grades ranging between 2.12% and 17.47%.
In its day, Tweefontein was one of South Africa’s highest grade copper mines with an average recovered grade of over 25%, said Jan Nelson, CEO of Copper 360 in a statement to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on Tuesday.
Drilling delineated a 1.5 kilometre anomaly adjacent to the historical copper pay-shoots of Tweefontein. The drilling results were confirmed by surface sampling over the anomaly on zone one with copper values of up to 17% in situ, said Nelson.
“This discovery is significant as we have only scratched the surface and have yet to drill further to depth and test the other three anomalies which are much larger than the first anomaly we drilled,” said Nelson.
“Should these anomalies yield the same result then we could easily have identified a new mine that could be four times the size of the Rietberg Mine and three times the grade,” said Nelson.
With the incorporation of assets from the soon-to-be-acquired Nama Copper, Copper 360’s expects total concentrate production to increase to about 7,975 tons by 2025.
The company announced on February 19 that it had raised an additional R100m through the issue of shares in order to conclude the R200m acquisition. The plan is for Copper360 to treat more ore through the Nama Copper plant from its Rietberg resource.
