Before I give you a quick update on how things are progressing on and off the field - and they’re progressing nicely - I wanted to direct you to a presentation I’ve been working with a lot over the last week.
In case you’ve not seen it, you can download it here.
It’s our Q4 corporate presentation and gives what I hope is a good overview of our projects and where they stand right now.
In there, you’ll find detailed assessments of where we’re at with the KCB, the KSZ, and Ditau.
I was busy last week in London at the 121 Mining Investment conference, talking to various people about our plans, using these slides.
The 121 Mining Investment event is a valuable one as it puts CEOs together with other executives and investors for a series of half hour one-to-one meetings.
The event came at a good time, with Kavango having just completed its strategic fund raise and just published the new prospectus (as I discussed with you in our last issue of Boots on the Ground.
I had a lot of positive conversations on our progress and a number of interesting new contacts.
You can’t beat getting to spend face-to-face time with investors. It really helps to get a true understanding of where people are and how people feel about what’s happening in the market. My overriding sense at the moment is there is a lot of genuine appetite for deals in the exploration space.
Investor appetite at previous events had tended to focus on much more developed projects, but this time there was a notable positive shift in sentiment towards companies like ours. With metal prices continuing to remain strong, this is not at all surprising, but it does offer encouraging light at the end of the tunnel for our sector that has struggled so much this year.
First up, here you can see one of the drilling rigs…
As you can imagine, this is an expensive bit of kit - and a crucial one - which is why, at the end of each drilling shift, our drill partners Mindea carry out regular maintenance on the rig to make sure everything is working and that any potential problems can be prevented.
Next, you can see here the core barrels that go into the ground…
Though it looks little more than scaffolding, these are obviously essential to the drilling process.
As they are drilled into the ground, the rock sample is collected inside and that provides us with what we call the core sample.
We use a process known as diamond drilling because industrial diamonds are used at the head of the rotating drill bit to. This method preserves whole sample of core that offer us an exact view of the rock layers beneath the ground.
You can watch a quick video that breaks down the difference between regular RC drilling and Diamond Core drilling here.
Indeed, once the drilling is done and a tube is removed from the ground, the core itself is removed from the tube and cut into roughly 1m long samples.
Here you can see the team completing a first visual inspection of the samples:
At this point our geologists are looking for evidence of mineralisation and what’s called ‘quartz veining’. This is a key aspect of the copper/silver mineralisation in the KCB.
Our team also performs tests for magnetic susceptibility and electrical conductance.
The aim here is to understand what’s in the ground and how it ties up with our surveys and models.
That’s what we’re doing right now at the KCB…
Inspecting…studying…analysing…
And it’s this sort of determination to learn as much about the potential of our licence areas as we can that is also helping us to achieve technical breakthroughs like the one we revealed on Friday morning.
As reported here, our latest line of Controlled-Source Audio Magnetotelluric, or “CSAMT”, surveying mapped KCB licence PL082’s geology down to a depth of 4,000m at a high quality.
That’s unprecedented, and far exceeded our expectations. Previously, the furthest our CSAMT had mapped to was around 1,000m.
At first, this might look like a development significant only to those with fairly advanced geological knowledge. I appreciate this was a technical announcement, but I believe it should be noted by all of our readers.
After all, 70% of Botswana is covered by Kalahari sand. This has been difficult to penetrate over the years. As a result, Botswana has been left heavily underexplored.
The more we prove the efficacy of CSAMT in overcoming these geological barriers and the more skilled we get at applying it…
The greater an advantage I believe we have when it comes to identifying mineral wealth in Botswana that was inaccessible to our predecessors.
That goes not just for our existing project areas, but also in other project areas we might consider in the future.
Success, of course, isn’t guaranteed. But the bottom line is, the recent corporate developments we’ve made alongside the progress we’re making with drilling and CSAMT mean it’s an exciting time for Kavango.
Now the prospectus process has been successful completed, I look forward to continuing to update investors over the coming weeks and months.
