Geologist expresses doubt Zambia can attain 3m tonnes of finished copper without airborne surveys

Government needs to urgently invest in airborne surveys to stimulate and guide mining exploration.

This will help to stem the inevitable decline in Zambia’s copper production, according to a mining engineer and former president of the Association of Zambian Mineral Exploration Companies (AZMEC), Gilbert Temba.

Temba said until Government committed to invest in airborne surveys, the goal of producing three million tonnes of finished copper production within a decade was nothing more than a pipe dream.

“To this day, Government has not committed to conducting airborne surveys as a priority.

“Airborne surveys to stimulate and guide exploration are urgently required to stem the otherwise inevitable decline in Zambia’s copper production,” Temba told the Mining for Zambia magazine on Tuesday in Lusaka.

On funding the venture, Temba said groups such as the World Bank and the European Union had expressed willingness to help Zambia to pay for this kind of airborne exploration.

He expressed that airborne geophysics was viewed as a “tool to promote mineral investment in Africa,” and international funding agencies such as the World Bank, European Community and African Development Bank supported their creation.

This, he said, was because research showed that, in jurisdictions across the world, high-quality geophysical coverage led directly to increase and more focused exploration.

“In other words, up-to-date surveys attract new investment in the mining sector, which spurs economic development,” Temba said.

Meanwhile, AZMEC secretary and Zambia Country Manager at KoBold Metals Alex Matthews, said good quality geoscientific data could also be used for many different purposes, from environmental monitoring, to agriculture, to hazard analysis.

KoBold Metals, an innovative exploration firm recently announced an investment of US$150 million to develop a copper mine around Zambia’s Mingoma deposit.

“It is important to remember that, with mining, your asset base reduces every time you haul a truck of ore. Zambia needs far more discovery and delineation. In order to do that, we need to get better at doing it, as a sector. How do we get better at it? We have to be braver and to drill more holes.

“That requires more money. We have also have to get better at applying our knowledge of exploration geoscience. But to help us get there, we also need to have much more freely available data. That is where the national airborne survey comes in,” Mathews said.