London-listed Kavango Resources plans to increase high-grade gold production at Prospect 4 at the Hillside project in Matabeleland, southern Zimbabwe.

High-grade gold mineralisation is currently being extracted by contract miners on a small-scale basis at Prospect 4 and trucked 20 km to Kavango’s processing facility at the main Hillside project area.

Production is constrained by the mining methods used, the distance by road to Kavango’s processing facility at Hillside and the Hillside processing facility’s maximum production capacity of 40 t/d to 50 t/d.

Therefore, with volumes currently very low, Kavango believes there is significant scope to increase high-grade gold production at Prospect 4.

As such, it has identified an experienced South African manufacturer to start work on designing a gold production plant, with the capacity to process a minimum 100 t/d and maximum 200 t/d of mineralised material.

The plant will be designed as a modular plant so that it can be easily and cheaply relocated to other projects within Kavango’s inventory, in the event that technical economic assessment (TEA) studies at Prospect 4 support the installation of a larger production plant, the company points out.

Kavango has conducted preliminary exploration over Prospect 4 and further exploration drilling will start in the New Year.

Four holes are planned from 500 m to 600 m in depth to test the continuity and depth extent of visible gold-bearing quartz-vein shears.

Currently, more than 12 subparallel vein sets have been identified.

“Following our recent announcement of resource drilling at Prospect 3, we continue at a fast pace of development at the Hillside gold project with plans for an underground high-grade gold operation at Prospect 4,” CE Ben Turney explains.

“We have high hopes for the next phase of drilling at Prospect 4. We’ve identified 12 sub-parallel vein sets, intersected a 2.53 m mineralised section grading at 29.08 g/t in Hole SKDD001 and have conducted extensive surface sampling that has returned very positive results.

“Once we have finished drilling at Prospect 3, we will mobilise the two rigs to Prospect 4 to conduct the next phase of exploration there. As well as assay tests, we intend to complete metallurgical testwork on core samples from the next four holes. Our goal will be to use this data to guide the TEA for this project,” Turney outlines.

“Given the amount of current high-grade small-scale mining at Prospect 4, we will work on the specification for a more advanced processing plant in parallel to exploration. We are confident production at Prospect 4 can sustain a minimum 100 t/d plant and potentially a 200 t/d plant in the near term.

“Our plan is then to use free cash flow generated through the new processing plant to pay for the TEA. If results are favourable, the final TEA for Prospect 4 could provide a blueprint for substantially higher gold production for Kavango,” he adds.