Noronex, South32 JV gears up to drill for Namibian copper

West Australian

22-07-2025

Noronex Limited and its joint venture partner South32 are gearing up to kick off a 7000-metre drilling program in search of copper at their joint Humpback-Damara project in the southwestern African country of Namibia.
A contract has been signed for an extensive drilling campaign, which the joint venture partners expect to begin next month and complete early next year. The program is part of an agreed $3 million exploration campaign to be conducted at the JV's Namibian projects this financial year.
The program is targeting new, large-scale copper discoveries in the Kalahari Copper Belt. It will test the mineralised contact on major domal structures across several prospects, where anomalous mineralisation was encountered in previous limited drilling programs.
South32, through a subsidiary company, is bankrolling the drilling at Humpback-Damara under an existing earn-in and joint venture agreement.
The agreement requires the globally diversified mining and metals company to spend $3 million per year for five years, with a minimum $15 million spend earning the company a 60 per cent interest in the Namibian project, which Noronex manages.
Management says its exploration program is gathering momentum. Noronex's upcoming drilling program will target the Humpback project, the company recently completed drilling at its Fiesta project and it is planning a diamond drilling campaign at its new Oosterwald prospect.
Three diamond drill holes have been completed at Fiesta, in the west of the Humpback ground, with assay results pending. The Fiesta project is on the western closure of a domal structure at the prospective NPF-D'Kar contact.
Anomalous copper intercepts at the site appear to have many of the hallmarks found in large deposits in Botswana, more than 400 kilometres east, including at Chinese miner MMG's long-life Khoemacau copper-silver mine, which contains 370 million tonnes at a stellar copper-equivalent grade of 1.7 per cent.
The copper mineralisation is hosted as disseminated chalcocite, chalcopyrite and bornite in a sequence of shales and siltstones of D'Kar sediments.
The diamond rig has now moved to the prospective Oosterwald target, part of Humpback-Damara, at the company's recently granted ground.
Drilling will target a potentially buried domal position of the D'Kar and Ngwako Pan formation contact. Management believes an uneroded dome provides scope for a large deposit in a fully preserved structural setting.
A planned hole will test an anomalous Heli-electromagnetic (EM) target from a historical Heli-EM airborne survey completed by ASX-listed Sandfire Resources in 2022, flown to better understand the depth of cover and effectiveness of airborne EM surveys across the ground.
Noronex will also probe with the drill-bit at its Powerline project, where it has designed a reverse circulation program to test large antiformal features outlined by a previous aeromagnetic survey.
Key target areas are where the NPF-D'Kar contact is predicted in the anticlinal hinge zone, similar to the placement of operating copper mines in Botswana, which are found in hinge zones. Previous limited drilling returned anomalous intercepts at the NPF-D'Kar contact.
Previous exploration by several firms defined regional targets, identified as T1 to T16.
Plans for a program of detailed magnetic grids and profiles will begin shortly to help drill targeting.
Noronex lodged two new applications with Botswana's mines department earlier this year through a fully owned subsidiary company to increase its holdings in the country by almost 1500 square kilometres, adjacent to the Humpback-Damara project on the Namibian side of the border.
The two new Botswana tenements were catapulted into the strategic alliance under the same financial terms as its Namibian projects, enabling South32 to bump up the JV ante and contribute a further $1 million per year for five years.
The additional contribution will lift South32's annual funding obligation to the strategic alliance to $4 million per annum, or a minimum $20 million over five years, to earn a 60 per cent stake in the agreed projects and tenement area.
Noronex will receive the annual $4 million payment in $1 million instalments paid at the beginning of each quarter to cover the expected management, drilling and exploration costs incurred under its watch, providing a reliable cash flow boost for the junior explorer.
The vast new Botswana ground sits in the northern section of the Kalahari Copper Belt and brings Noronex's total landholdings within the belt to nearly 10,000 square kilometres.
Noronex also holds a 95 per cent interest in the Witvlei project in Namibia, containing a 10-million-tonne resource at 1.3 per cent copper.
The company also recently kick-started a six-week radioactive spectrometry survey across 17.9 square kilometres of its Etango North uranium project in Namibia. The survey is designed to hunt for high-grade hard rock uranium, known as alaskite, in one of the world's most fertile uranium neighbourhoods.
Noronex's ground is just 3km north of Bannerman Energy's giant 225-million-pound Etango deposit and immediately south of major operations, such as the Rossing and Husab mines.
Both Noronex and South32 appear to believe Namibia is the land of opportunity and it will be interesting to see what develops from the many exploration programs on-the-go in the mineral-rich African nation.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact:
[e-mail]