Following the analysis of historical geological data at its first two northern exploration licences in the Ngamiland district in Botswana, explorer and developer Botswana Minerals has used its Planetary AI’s Xplore platform to identify 36 copper anomalies within six exploration corridors, including a structurally controlled copper/silver trend extending for about 9.5 km and a separate lead/zinc-rich zone.

This is helping to refine any future development of an eight-licence position in a highly underexplored part of the country.

The AI-powered review of more than a gigabyte of historical reports, some as old as 50 years, identified records of chalcopyrite in historical drill core, together with other copper minerals, from drilling originally undertaken for uranium and diamonds, says Botswana Minerals MD James Campbell.

“The point is not that conventional geology could never have found this evidence, but that AI has allowed us to interrogate dispersed information at a scale and speed that would have been impractical manually. [It has helped us] convert it into a coherent, ranked exploration programme,” he explains.

The Xplore platform, adds Campbell, is used as an integration and ranking tool rather than as a substitute for geological judgement, as it brings together Botswana Minerals’ various geological datasets. This enables Botswana Minerals to refine its exploration fieldwork before committing scarce capital to further fieldwork and targeted drilling.

Campbell says, for a junior company, Botswana Minerals controls an “unusually” extensive geological dataset on Botswana, including decades of geophysics, geochemistry, drilling and historical reports. The sheer volume of these reports makes it unrealistic to interrogate manually at the same speed or consistency as that capable using the Planetary AI’s Xplore platform.

“Xplore can clean, integrate and compare those datasets to identify where evidence converges and rank the targets that deserve field expenditure,” he emphasises.



As the exploration licences for Botswana Minerals’ Ngamiland projects have been granted, the company’s ongoing exploration programme is being progressed from regional target generation toward field validation and drill prioritisation.