Zambia is Africa’s second-largest copper producer and the world’s eighth-top-producing country of the base metal, putting companies such as Midnight Sun Mining (TSXV:MMA) in a strong position to be leaders in the space.
In line with this, Zambia is host to the Zambia-Congo copper belt, which features a geological environment conducive to large, high-grade and scalable copper deposits, including some of the world’s largest.
Within Zambia, the company’s flagship target is called Dumbwa, located in the southeast portion of its Solwezi Project. Dumbwa is a tier-one exploration target featuring a 20-kilometre anomaly reaching grades of up to 0.73 per cent copper-in-soil.
Midnight Sun Mining revealed in February that it had signed an earn-in agreement with KoBold Metals – which is an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven battery metals exploration and mining company – to explore the Dumbwa target.
Midnight Sun and KoBold Metals partner on Dumbwa target
In a news release, the company revealed that KoBold Metals will carry out systematic exploration of the Dumbwa target over a four-and-a-half-year period.
KoBold Metals will spend US$15 million in exploration in addition to making cash payments totalling $500,000 over that period to earn a 75 per cent interest in the target.
In an interview with The Market Online, Midnight Sun Mining’s director of marketing and communications Adrian O’Brien said the company’s collaboration with KoBold is “huge.”
“We’re going to be aggressively drilling and exploring and we’re going to find out what Dumbwa really has,” O’Brien told The Market Online.
Notably, Midnight Sun Mining’s property is surrounded by the five biggest copper mines in Africa,” he said of the nearby interests of First Quantum, Barrick, Rio Tinto, Anglo American and KoBold Metals. First Quantum’s Kansanshi Mine, which is Africa’s largest copper producer, is right next door to the company.
“We look forward to KoBold applying [its] groundbreaking exploration approach to the Dumbwa Target and moving this important Zambian copper asset toward development together, which we view as perfectly timed to coincide with an upcoming phase of unprecedented global copper demand,” Al Fabbro, CEO of Midnight Sun Mining, said in a statement.
The Dumbwa target
Dumbwa is one of four key prospects composing Midnight Sun’s 506-square-kilometre Solwezi Project which is located in the heart of the Zambia-Congo Copperbelt.
Notably, Dumbwa features a continuous high-grade copper-in-soil anomaly that extends for more than 20 kilometres along strike and spans more than 1 kilometre in width with peak values of up to 0.73 per cent copper. Exploration work to date has included geochemical analysis and geophysics, indicating that systematic drilling guided by structural controls is the next step towards establishing continuity, size and scale of an underlying system.
The Dumbwa Target area included in the KoBold agreement spans 108 square kilometres where KoBold expects to begin a drilling campaign sometime this year and begin a systematic exploration of structural targets at Dumbwa.
The remaining 398 square kilometres of property that make up the Solwezi Project will remain with Midnight Sun, which expects to continue exploration on the other key targets outside of the area subject to the KoBold earn-in agreement.
The joint venture agreement
Once KoBold completes its earn-in agreement obligations, the two companies will form a separate company that will first be held by KoBold and Midnight Sun Mining, with each holding 75 per cent and 25 per cent respectively.
The Dumbwa target will then be separated from Midnight Sun Mining’s existing license into a new license and assigned to the joint venture company.
Management and advisory board
Midnight Sun continues to strengthen its team; case in point, on March 14, 2024, the company announced the appointment of Darin Wagner to their advisory board. Mr. Wagner is a Professional Geologist with extensive experience building and leading exploration stage companies, as well as guiding mineral exploration programs globally, and leading a number of M&A transactions.
Mr. Wagner stated, “The recent agreement with KoBold Metals is a hugely significant milestone and shareholders should be excited about what this means for the project.”
The investment corner
With Midnight Sun Mining’s ideal location in the Zambia-Congo Belt – which is the second-largest copper-producing region of the world – the company is in a unique position compared with its peers to be game-changers in the copper space.
As demand for copper is expected to reach unprecedented rates in addition to skyrocketing market prices in the coming years, companies such as Midnight Sun Mining will be in a prime position to fuel this growing market, making it a sound investment opportunity before the rush begins.
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