JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Follow-up drilling at Aim-listed Savannah Resources’ 180 km² Jangamo heavy mineral sands (HMS) project, in southern Mozambique, has confirmed zones of higher-grade HMS.

Savannah CEO David Archer said in a statement on Monday that the resource drilling programme had returned “good” grades of thick, near surface HMS mineralisation over good strike lengths in the JMRC051 and JMRC123 areas.

Results included 24 m at 5.21% HMS from surface, including 9 m at 8.05% HMS, and 33 m at 5.18% HMS from surface, including 15 m at 6.55% HMS.

Scout drilling along the 15 km strandline to the west of the project area had intersected “encouraging” zones of mineralisation and would form one of the main focuses of the ongoing exploration programme in 2015.

“We will now start work on calculating a Joint Ore Reserves Committee-compliant resource for the mineralisation that has been defined to date, with this work expected to be completed by the end of the year,” Archer noted.

He added that Jangamo was a large system and the company remained focused on defining a higher-grade project with “superior” economic characteristics for the development of a profitable mining operation with modest capital costs.

“This complements the favourable local infrastructure setting that benefits from nearby roads, power, port and I look forward to providing timely updates on this in due course,” Archer said.

Jangamo is located in a world-class mineral sands province, adjacent to Rio Tinto's major Mutamba mineral sands deposit, which, along with another licence area in Mozambique, has an exploration target of between 7-billion tons and 12-billion tons at between 3% and 4.5% total heavy minerals.

Commenting on the announcement, analyst group SP Angel stated that, should the company delineate a resource by the end of this year, it would have made good progress on the project.

“The challenge will be in upgrading the resource once established, which is always challenging with mineral sands projects,” said the firm.