VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – Africa-focused explorer and project developer Ivanhoe Mines has made a new tier-one, high-grade and flat-lying layered copper discovery in the Kakula exploration area, about 5 km southwest of the currently defined resources at the Kamoa copper deposit, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Ivanoe – one of the latest iterations of billionaire mining legend Robert Friedland’s lustrous career – on Monday advised that the new discovery was ideally situated for low-cost mechanised mining.

“The Kamoa copper deposit is already distinguished as the world’s largest, undeveloped, high-grade copper discovery. The Kakula discovery has the combination of significant thickness, high grades and strike length, which holds promise for the significant and rapid expansion of the Kamoa copper deposit.

“The Kakula discovery not only shows the potential to substantially increase the size of the Kamoa copper deposit, it also highlights the potential for new discoveries to the west of Kolwezi in the Congolese copperbelt,” stated Friedland.

The Kakula discovery was situated within the 400 km² Kamoa mining licence area and represented a significant extension of the Kamoa copper deposit, which the company discovered in 2008. The Kamoa project is a joint venture between Ivanhoe Mines and Chinese investor Zijin Mining.

Two exploration drill holes completed in late 2015 in the Kakula exploration area — DKMC_DD996 and DKMC_DD997 — ranked among the highest-grade and highest-grade-thickness intersections drilled to date within the Kamoa copper deposit licence area.

DKMC_DD996 intersected 24.16 m (24.13 m true width) of 3.48% copper, at a 1% copper cutoff. At a higher cutoff of 2% copper, the intersection was 13.16 m (13.14 m true width) of 5.26% copper. DKMC_DD997 intersected 18.75 m (18.47 m true width) of 4.64% copper at a 1% copper cutoff and 15.17 m (14.94 m true width) of 5.33% copper at a 2% copper cutoff.

Ivanhoe reported that the two holes were drilled into an area of thick, high-grade copper mineralisation first identified in 2014 — now called the Kakula discovery area — within the large, 60 km² Kakula exploration area. The two holes represented 400 m step-outs north and east from an earlier high-grade copper intersection in drill hole DKMC_DD942.

Ivanhoe planned to complete an 800-m-spacing infill grid over the Kakula discovery area this year.