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Infill drilling at DRC copper project to start next month

15th April 2016

By: David Oliveira

Creamer Media Staff Writer

  

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Canadian exploration and development company Ivanhoe Mines executive chairperson Robert Friedland announced earlier this month that the company and its joint venture partner Chinese miner Zijin Mining were preparing to accelerate a planned infill drilling programme on the Kakula discovery area at their Kamoa copper project, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), next month.

Speaking at the fifteenth World Copper Conference, in Santiago, Chile, Friedland said the Kamoa exploration team’s goal was to complete about 25 000 m of additional drilling in the Kakula discovery area in 2016.

The company is upgrading access and drill roads in the Kakula discovery area to support the additional diamond drill rigs that will be mobilised to site early next month.

“Our accelerated infill drilling programme will target thick, flat- lying, shallow resources at grades materially higher than the average grades at Kamoa that potentially could be incorporated into our Phase 1 feasibility study,” Friedland said, adding that the programme could improve the already robust economics reported in the independent prefeasibility study in February this year. Further, the drilling programme would help ensure Kamoa becomes one of the highest-grade, new copper mines in the world.

The accelerated programme will initially focus on a 12 km2 area along the projected trend of mineralisation intersected at holes DD996 and DD997, which were completed in 2015. The programme now also includes follow-up infill drilling to define indicated resources in areas where the continuity of materially higher-grade mineralisation is confirmed.

The DD996 and DD997 holes rank among the highest-grade and highest-grade-thickness intersections drilled to date at Kamoa.

Hole DD996 intersected 24.16 m of 3.48% copper, at a 1% copper cutoff. At a higher cutoff of 2% copper, the DD996 intersection was 13.16 m of 5.26% copper. Hole DD997 intersected 18.75 m of 4.64% copper at a 1% copper cutoff and 15.17 m of 5.33% copper at a 2% copper cutoff.

Ivanhoe Mines reported in January that the Kamoa exploration team had made a new tier-one, high-grade, shallow and flat-lying stratiform copper discovery, ideally located for low-cost mechanised mining in the Kakula discovery area, about 5 km south-west of the currently defined resources at the Kamoa copper deposit.

The Kakula discovery is located within the 400 km2 Kamoa mining licence area and represents a major extension of the Kamoa copper deposit, which the company discovered in 2008.

Friedland said in the January announcement that the Kamoa copper deposit had already been distinguished as the world’s largest, undeveloped, high-grade copper discovery: “The Kakula discovery has . . . significant thickness, high grades and strike length that hold promise for significant and rapid expansion of the Kamoa copper deposit.”

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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