(MENAFN- ProactiveInvestors - UK) In double-quick time the T3 copper prospect in north eastern Botswana has gone from grass roots exploration to real development opportunity.
The T3 deposit was only discovered in March but already its owners - joint venture partners MOD Resources (ASX:MOD) and Metal Tiger PLC (LON:MTR) - have been able to prove up a resource of 350,000 tonnes of copper, more than half of it in the indicated category.
What's more, there is a high grade core of 8.6 mln tonnes of ore grading 2.16% copper and 30.6 grams silver per tonne.
And there could be more to come. The resource remains open down dip and along strike, and the drill rigs are currently turning with a view to adding more resource before too long.
Meanwhile, an open pit mining scoping study is due in December. Already there are clear indications of the thinking of the partners.
'If the deposit is mined the central core of high-grade vein hosted mineralisation may provide an opportunity for early payback of capital,' Metal Tiger said in an update to market.
'The high silver content should provide significant concentrate credits.'
That will be music to the ears of mining investors with shorter-term horizons. But in the long-term what may turn out to be more interesting will be the results of the current drilling.
At 350,000 tonnes, T3 is already making some impact on the global scale. At one end, long-standing London copper miner, Atalaya Mining, is now fully operational on a smaller reserve and resource base.
But on the other hand, the largest undeveloped copper project in the world, which is widely thought to be the Udokan copper project in the Zabaikal region of Russia, boasts 16 mln tonnes of copper in contained reserves alone, never mind the resource.
How far MOD and Metal Tiger can move T3 away from comparisons to the smaller Atalaya resource and up towards the size of Udokan remains to be seen.
It's worth noting that the combined reserves and resources of BCL, the state copper mining company at Botswana, are nearer in scale to T3, than to Udokan.
That's no surprise given the shared geological setting, but it does mean that when it comes to development, T3 could end up as a big hitter in the Botswana copper mining scene.
However, further north, in the famous Copper Belt, the mines move into another league.
The KOV mine, held by Katanga has produced over 2 mln tonnes of copper over many decades of production, while the Tenke Fungurume mine held jointly by Lundin and Freeport (NYSE:FCX), holds a contained copper resource base of 3.8 mln tonnes.
Freeport has just inked a deal to sell its 80% stake in Tenke Fungurume to a Chinese company for US$2.65 bn in cash.
It's quite some world to be moving into.
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