Modern Mining July 2019

COUNTRY FOCUS: BOTSWANA

Tonota started its exploration in 2014. “We first walked the ground looking for signs of graphite and then we put two core holes in an area which we thought looked good and both intercepted significant graphite,” he said. “We followed this with a trenching pro- gramme based on VTEM data we had obtained and found graphite mineralisation in many of them. In 2015 we did RC and diamond drilling on the trenches and this provided the basis for a JORC-compliant inferred resource estimate later in the year.” The resource comprises 69,9 Mt at 8,82 % Total Graphite Content (TGC). Scholtz points out that it is very likely to grow considerably, as most of the licence area remains unex- plored. “Only 10 km of the 100 km of graphitic anomalies identified have been drilled,” he explained. “We are targeting a resource of up to 500 Mt at 8,0 % TGC for a total of 40 Mt of contained graphite.” He added that while the current resource was near surface and under 100 m depth, one drill hole was mineralised up to 359 m and still intersecting graphite when drilling was stopped. In his presentation to the BRSC, Scholtz described the project geology as consisting of pre-Cambrian amphibolite-facies rocks includ- ing gneisses, ultrabasic units and sedimentary assemblages, with the graphite mineralisation occurring in the meta sedimentary assemblage (and chiefly in the marble unit). Activity on the project was subdued in 2016 and much of 2017 but the tempo of work has picked up sharply since then. A second round of trenching increasing the mineralised strike

length from 10 km to 20 km was completed early last year. All the trenches intersected graphite with up to 15 % TGC being recorded. Fresh drilling at the site is currently underway with drilling contractor RA Longstaff busy with a 2 000 m programme of RC drilling to increase the size of the resource. According to Scholtz, the next step after the present round of drilling will be to raise funding for further RC infill drilling so that Tonota can start upgrading the resource from the inferred category to the indicated and mea- sured categories. “We also need to do some more core drilling so that we can obtain sam- ples for further metallurgical work,” he told Modern Mining . Flake size testing was undertaken by SGS in 2015 on ore samples from the project and mineralogical analysis by Dorfner ANZAPLAN in Germany. The results were highly posi- tive. High-value flake graphite makes up over 75 % of the resource, with the Super Jumbo (>500 µm) size category accounting for 53,3 %, Jumbo (300 µm to 500 µm) for 16,3 % and Large (180 µm to 300 µm) for 7,6 %. The recovery

Above: Trench logging by geologist Hunter Kennedy (an associate of Nico Scholtz). Above left: A graphite sample from the 2014 trenching programme.

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