Pambili drills for gold at Golden Valley mine

Oliver Kazunga Senior Business Writer

PAMBILI Natural Resources, which is developing the Golden Valley Mine near Bulawayo, says it is conducting a six-hole drilling programme at the asset to identify a gold resource that can be brought into production.

Recently, the mining group announced that it had brought the gold production plant at Golden Valley Mine (GVM) back on line.

Last year in November, Pambili announced that it had entered into a share purchase agreement to acquire the Golden Valley project from White Satin Investments (Privvincate) Limited signifying a critical moment in the firm’s growth plan.

In an update, the mining group said: “Pambili is conducting a planned six-hole drilling programme at GVM with the objective of identifying a gold resource it can rapidly bring into production.

“The corporation restarted golden production at GVM earlier this year, processing sands from the project’s third party toll-milling facilities as well as from processing material from the drives developed to facilitate the underground programme.”

As part of the drilling programme, two holes–each to a depth of 100 metres, have been completed and the mining group is investigating the potential that the above shear represents a parallel structure to the historically mined ore body at GVM.

Pambili’s first down-dip hole has reached a depth of 25m and is expected to be completed over the coming days.

“This hole is testing the down-dip continuity of the historic GVM orebody,” it said.

The mining industry is one of Zimbabwe’s major economic centerpieces accounting for over 75 percent of the national export earnings while gold is the single largest export expected to contribute US$4 billion going forward into next year from about US$2,7 billion in 2023.

At the moment, the gold sub-sector accounts for US$3 billion and in 2022 the country produced 35,3 tonnes while output last year plummeted to 30,1 tonnes due to operational challenges small-scale miners faced in relation to electricity supply, among other constraints.

The Government has committed to address the headwinds facing the mining industry from which a gold target of 35 tonnes has been set.