JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Three new prospecting licences (PLs) have been issued to Tanzania-focussed Kibo Mining’s wholly-owned subsidiary Rukwa Coal, allowing the JSE-listed miner to extend exploration to tenements contiguous with its existing PL block, in southern Tanzania, which contains the 109-million-ton Mbeya coal mineral resource.

The Mbeya resource underpinned the company's Mbeya coal-to-power project (MCPP), currently in the final stages of a bankable feasibility study (BFS).

The three new PLs were located immediately north, south and east respectively of the resource, consolidating the company's ground position on and peripheral to the MCPP development area.

In the short term, Kibo believed these new PLs would further enhance the BFS and subsequent development of the project and, in the longer term, provide the company with significantly increased exploration potential.

The new licences would provide the company with the ability to test for extensions to the resource and the potential discovery of additional satellite coal deposits beyond the existing deposit's 48 km strike, of which, to date, only 12 km had been delineated and stated as a compliant resource.

“The addition of these PLs to the Mbeya portfolio completes an important and very strategic consolidation of the ground immediately adjacent to its Mbeya coal resource.

“This is of significant strategic importance, as it secures the long-term fuel supply to the power station, provides confidence that the power plant can ultimately be expanded to 1 000 MW and allays any fears from long-term investors about possible instability in the long-term fuel prices at which the power station will be able to procure fuel for the power plant,” commented CEO Louis Coetzee.

He added that the awarding of the licences demonstrated the Tanzanian government's ongoing support for and acknowledgment of the strategic importance of the MCPP.