TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Project developer Ivanhoe Mines has deployed up to nine drills to undertake a 25 000 m drilling campaign on the Kakula discovery on the Kamoa copper mining licence area, in the Democratic Republic of Congo – a project billed as the largest undeveloped high-grade copper deposit in the world.

The in-fill and exploration drilling programme would test the high-grade and flat-lying stratiform copper discovery, ideally situated for low-cost, mechanised mining and representing a significant extension of the Kamoa copper deposit, which Ivanhoe had discovered in 2008.

The Kamoa project entailed a joint venture between Ivanhoe Mines and Zijin Mining.

The new drilling programme, which started after the end of the yearly rainy season, would target and delineate areas of thick, high-grade copper mineralisation intersected near surface at the Kakula discovery. The discovery lay within the large, 60 km² Kakula exploration area, and was about 10 km south-west of the Kamoa project’s planned initial mining area, at Kansoko Sud.

The drilling programme would focus on a 12 km² area along the projected trend of mineralisation intersected in two high-grade holes – DD996 and DD997 – that were completed last year. Drilling would target shallow resources at grades materially higher than the average grades at Kamoa that potentially could be incorporated into Kamoa’s Phase 1 feasibility study, which was currently under way, the company advised.

The programme would also include follow-up infill drilling aimed at defining indicated resources in areas where the continuity of materially higher grade was confirmed.

An independent prefeasibility study (PFS) on the first phase of development envisaged the construction of an underground mine, a concentrator processing facility and associated infrastructure.

The PFS proposed a yearly mine output of three-million tonnes at an average grade of 3.86% copper over a 24-year mine life, resulting in production of 100 000 t/y.