Canada-headquartered diversified miner Tsodilo Resources provided a corporate update with respect to its legal action against the Botswana Ministry of Minerals and Energy (MME).
Oral argument was held in the High Court in Maun, Botswana on April 18, 2023, with respect to the MME’s decision to not renew Prospecting Licence PL020/2018 held by the company’s Botswana subsidiary Gcwihaba Resources.
Tsodilo has a 100% stake in its Gcwihaba project area, which comprises five prospecting licences, all located in the North-West district of Botswana.
The litigation landing page has been updated with the parties' documents filed with the court. The judge has indicated that a written judgment is to be expected on August 1 this year.
Since the filing of the complaint against MME on October 31 last year, there has been an overwhelming request for proceeding filings and related documentation pertinent to the matter.
To be fully transparent and meet the volume of requests, the company has established landing pages which are regularly updated to include all records related to the litigation.
Xaudum Iron Formation
The Xaudum Iron Formation (XIF), located in the North-West district of Botswana, is proximate to the Namibian border and lies about 35 km from the town of Divundu in Namibia.
The Walvis Bay-Ndola-Lubumbashi Development Corridor (previously known as the Trans-Caprivi line) linking Zambia and Namibia is planned to pass through Divundu, providing access to Walvis Bay, Namibia’s deep-sea port. The project is also located within about 69 km of the proposed Mucusso line to Angola’s Namibe port.
Preliminary work on the XIF project has defined a common information model- (CIM-) compliant inferred mineral resource estimate of 441-million tonnes with an average grade of 29.4% iron, 41.0% silicon dioxide, 6.1% aluminium oxide and 0.3% phosphorous for the Block 1 magnetite XIF.
Block 1 is a fraction of the potential XIF magnetite resource. An extrapolated exploration target has defined the XIF to be in the order of 5-billion to 7-billion tonnes at 15% to 40% iron.
This exploration target was generated by inversion modelling of ground magnetic geophysical data, which was compared and moderated to volumes from drilling data within Block 1, and its potential quantity and grade is conceptual in nature. To date, there has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource other than in Block 1 and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource.
Metallurgical magnetic separation results (from Davis Tube Recovery) show that an average concentrate of 67.2% iron, 4.2% silicon dioxide, 0.5% aluminium oxide, 0.07% phosphorus is obtained at P80 grind size of 80 microns, although higher grades are possible at finer P80s.