Modern Mining February 2021

COKING COAL

Contango forges ahead at Lubu Coalfield Project

Despite the current national lockdown in place across Zimbabwe since January 5 this year, Contango Holdings is forging ahead at its flagship Lubu Coalfield Project. The company expects to finalise its discussions with the proposed mining contractor ahead of opening two pits at Lubu in February 2021. By Munesu Shoko .

H aving signed two letters of intent (LOIs) for offtake agreements for a combined 32 000 tonnes per month of coking coal last year, LSE-listed Contango Holdings has successfully upgraded the Binga Camp, the base of operations for the first phase of development of its Lubu coking coal project in Zimbabwe. In a major development critical to the start of production at Lubu Coalfield Project, located in the Binga area of Zimbabwe and said to be one of the biggest deposits of its nature in southern Africa with a total resource of 2-billion tonnes of coal, CEO Carl Esprey says the company expects to finalise its discussions with the proposed mining contractor imminently ahead of opening two pits at Lubu this

month. This, he says, will be a significant milestone for Contango and will enable ongoing coking coal offtake discussions to be finalised. In addition, it will allow the requested bulk samples, which will provide first revenues from Lubu to Contango, to be delivered to a number of multi-national companies assessing the viability of constructing coke plants at Lubu. The manufacture of coke at site would provide a significant boost to the value of the product generated at Lubu, which is already considered to be highly valuable. In a recent update, the company announced that the site had recently been inspected by the Environment Management Agency (EMA) following the camp site rehabilitation and access upgrades

Contango Holdings will initially prioritise mining a small area dubbed the B2 Block.

16  MODERN MINING  February 2021