Baobab Resources Plc (LON:BAO) is a mining exploration company with an exclusive focus on Mozambique. It was formed in 2005 to acquire Capitol Resources, a Mozambique-based company, which held 16 exploration licences. These give the company a longer term pipeline of prospects, but right now only two of them are actively being exploited - Mundonguara and Tete, a copper/gold and iron ore prospect respectively.
The copper-gold mine at Mundonguara has a Stage 1 JORC compliant inferred mineral resource - it was asessed at 3.1 mt, 1.4% copper, 0.11g/t gold and 2.1g/t silver [1] . There's a 3km long corridor of mineralisation, giving it significant further exploration potential.
The iron ore prospect at Tete covers two areas, the Massamba Group and Singore. The whole area covers 632 square kilometres. Massamba has five prospects - Chitongue Grande, Pequeno, Caangua, Chimbala and the South Zone - of which Chitongue has been most extensively surveyed, with a 15 diamond drill hole programme last year. Exploration of Massamba is further advanced; work on Singore has started more recently.
Coffey Mining Pty, an independent mining consultancy, has signed off on a maiden inferred mineral resource (JORC compliant) of 47.7 million tons of magnetite-ilmenite for a 500 metre portion of Chitongue Grande, based on last year's drilling programme. That's 500 metres out of a total 8 km strike, so further drilling could well improve the resource figure markedly.
For the broader Massamba Group area, there's no hard evidence yet, so no resource, but Coffey gave an exploration target of 400-700 million tons. That obviously requires a heavy discount to inferred resources to account for exploration risk.
This looks like reasonably high grade mineralisation - while Chitongue is only expected to see 20-35% mass recovery, sampling of other areas of the project has shown recovery rates that could be in excess of 50% [2] . As results have come through, they have shown increasing levels of Fe over the initial test work. The company also notes that blending of feedstocks once the resource has been developed could improve recovery rates significantly [3]
This year will see further scout drilling in the South Zone - a downdip extension of the other areas of mineralisation - and Chimbala. The company is aiming to improve confidence in the size…
