Kavango Resources plc has identified “significant” and “potentially economic” multi-element concentrations including tungsten at the Hillside gold project in Matabeleland, southern Zimbabwe.
PATHFINDER
The company plans to widen its exploration in the country for the “strategic elements” including bismuth, selenium, molybdenum and further tests for tungsten value and widths.
The results, with a peak tungsten intersection of 2,200 parts per million (ppm), are from multi-element assays from inductively coupled plasma (ICP) tests on three sets of core samples from four diamond drill holes.
Kavango has six gold exploration targets of prospects one to six at Hillside, “hosted in a single Archeaen greenstone belt”.
“Tungsten and other strategic elements are known to occur in such greenstone hosted gold deposits around the world,” said the company.
“Depending on grade and concentration, such strategic elements can be extracted as commercial biproducts as part of a gold production process.”
The company added that tungsten occurred across prospects one, two and three.
Kavango has drilled 11 diamond core holes to test five of the six prospects,”repeatedly” logging “high” tungsten, bismuth, selenium and molybdenum values in pXRF spot readings.
The company has also observed scheelite in association with gold mineralisation.
Hillside lies in the Filabusi greenstone belt which, along with surrounding granitoids, has a past recorded production of 1,920.70 tonnes of tungsten concentrate from 106 deposits.
The findings from historical data are mainly at shallow depths and the majority were as by product or credits from gold production.
“Given that this element [tungsten] can act as a pathfinder for other strategic elements, we are increasingly confident of the discovery potential in our area,” said chief executive Ben Turney.
“Moving forward, we will now conduct ICP testing on all drill cores taken from the Hillside and Nara gold projects to widen our search for more metals and elements.”