JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – A drilling programme at Aim-listed resource exploration and development company Edenville Energy’s Rukwa coalfield project, in Tanzania, has upgraded the project’s total estimated resource to 173-million tons.
Of this updated Joint Ore Reserves Committee-compliant resource, 57.5-million tons were of an acceptable quality to sell on to a local power station and/or local industry operators in the region.
The drilling programme was carried out by Sound Mining Solutions, which provided services for borehole logging, database management, geological modelling and coal resource estimation at the Mkomolo, Namwele and Muze coal deposits in the Rukwa coalfield.
Edenville Energy pointed out that detailed geological investigation of the drill data led to the identification of six fault blocks within the Mkomolo block, with up to four separate coal zones being identified within these fault blocks. At Namwele a single fault block within a single coal zone was identified, while a single fault block hosting two coal zones was identified at Muze.
The coal resource area had been defined by the projection of the geological coal zone to a depth of 500 m down dip from the boreholes’ intersection and 500 m along strike from the last borehole intersecting coal.
"The board is extremely encouraged by this upgraded Joint Ore Reserves Committee-compliant standard resource estimate for our Rukwa coalfield project…This is a significant upgrade on the 2012 resource statement, expanding the total measured, indicated and inferred tonnage and converting the majority of tons to the measured and indicated [M&I] category,” Edenville chairperson Sally Schofield commented.
"We now have a solid platform from which to progress our stated strategy of evaluating Phase I mining at Namwele in parallel with the longer-term goal of establishing a partnership to provide coal to a mine-mouth power station," she added.