Kihabe Base Metals Project - Botswana
Location: Ngamiland, Botswana and Tsumkwe, Namibia
Owner: Mount Burgess Mining NL 100%
Project Location
The Kihabe Base Metals Project is located on the border of Botswana and Namibia about 700km north-west of the capital, Gaborone, in Ngamiland. The Project is 350km by road from Maun and 50km from Tsumkwe, Namibia.
Tenements
The Company has tenements covering 100% of the known prospective Proterozoic Belt of metasedimentary rocks, with around one third of the prospective geology occurring in Botswana (PL 69/2003, area ~1,000km²) and two thirds in Namibia.
The Kihabe Project was held in the early 1980’s by Billiton Botswana (Pty) Limited, which carried out extensive soil geochemical reconnaissance and drilled three anomalous prospects, Kihabe , Nxuu Prospect and the Gossan Prospect.
Regional Geology and Ore Genesis
The prospective geology of the Kihabe Base Metals Project is defined by a belt of Proterozoic sedimentary rocks composed primarily of carbonate and siliclastic rocks. The Belt forms a trapezoidal wedge of tightly to isoclinally folded metamorphosed sediments of the Damaran Supergroup, bounded by granites and gneisses of the Quangwadum Complex and Kihabe Complex.
The target mineralisation is primarily stratiform to stratabound sedimentary exhalative (SEDEX) sulphides occurring at a known stratigraphic level within the basin. The Company’s geological model is that the Belt represents a re-closed rift basin with a fill of arkose, greywacke, quartzites and sabkha-facies stromatolitic dolomites.
Thirteen soil anomalies for lead, zinc and copper exist within the Company’s tenements in Botswana, which include Kihabe, the Nxuu Prospect, Copper Anomaly and the Gossan Prospect. Extensive reconnaissance soil sampling is underway in Namibia over similar terrain, with several anomalies identified to date.
The Kihabe and Nxuu Zinc-Lead-Silver Resources
The Kihabe Resource is located along a contact between the dolomite footwall and a sequence of rhythmically bedded sandstones, which have been folded and metamorphosed to, respectively, dolomitic marble and chloritic quartzite. The local geology of the deposit is known to be a west-plunging syncline.
Zinc, lead and silver mineralisation which is developed within the host quartzite within thick, coarse grained beds, weakens upwards in the stratigraphy as the grain size reduces. Mineralisation forms a series of overlapping stacked horizons controlled by the beds within the quartzite, over a strike length of 2.4 km.
The Nxuu resource is located approximately 5.5 km east south-east of Kihabe. Zinc and lead mineralisation at Nxuu is developed within a shallow, flat lying sedimentary quartz wacke host rock, situated in a synclinal structure or basin, bounded by barren dolomite.
The Company has published an initial JORC Resource at Kihabe and Nxuu. An initial programme of 13,000m of reverse circulation drilling and close to 6,000 metres of diamond core drilling has defined 27.4 million tonnes grading 2.32% zinc equivalency. 60% of the Resource conforms to an Indicated Category and 40% to the Inferred Category.
Gossan Prospect
The Gossan anomaly is a two kilometre long, by half kilometre wide soil anomaly with +1,000ppm zinc and +500ppm lead in soil, hosted within a valley bounded by dolomite, situated 15 km south of the Kihabe resource.
The Company has identified an in-situ gossan outcrop with peak values in rock sampling of 21.95% zinc, 7% Pb and 30 ounces per tonne of silver, which is a likely source for the extensive soil anomalism.
Development Progress
The Company is awaiting the results of a revised scoping study to determine the break-even metal prices required for the Kihabe/Nxuu Project.
