Kuvimba Mining House is optimistic in limiting environmental impact on its operations at Sandawana Mine as the company would follow the guidelines from Environmental Management Agency (EMA). The Sandawana mine, located in Mberengwa District, Zimbabwe, was purchased by the giant mine in 2019. The mine dates back to 1955, when emeralds were first extracted there, and KMH has invested more than US$50 million on recovering operations and looking for lithium.
Addressing journalists last week, the head of the energy cluster, Trevor Barnard, said “It’s a typical mining operation; it will be open pit mining, so you will have blasting, you will have loads and hauling, and you will have some processes, but we will make sure that we capture most of the fugitive dusty emissions.
“So we will do dusty suppression and dusty emission capture so that we do not create any amount of dust in the environment around us.” For the chemicals that will be used on the site, the organisation will ensure that they are properly stored and managed so that they do not harm the environment.
Barnard added that KMH will follow EMA directives in its activities, and that in the meanwhile, they have an EIA that has given them the go-ahead for the current mining operations at Sandawana Mine.
“From an environmental perspective, we will obviously follow the directives from EMA, and we have an EIA in place. And we will make sure that we comply with the requirements of the EIA certificate.
“When we go for the next phase of development, there will be another EIA application before we start with that development because every time you do a project like this size, you have to get an EIA approval for that,” he said.
The Sandawana Mine is filled with activity now that the first phase of drilling has been completed, and chemical analysis is underway and scheduled to be completed this month. According to preliminary exploration data, the resource is expected to be more than 30 million tonnes with a grade of roughly 1.6%, making it a significant resource.
The phase 2 drilling campaign has already begun and is expected to be finished in the first quarter of next year. “We also launched phase 2 of the exploration already; the drilling of this is ongoing as we speak and is expected to be finished by the first quarter of next year. Again, we estimate that we will double the size of the resource by that time,” Barnard added.
KMH is confident that with further exploration under phases 3 and 4, Sandawana has a total resource size of around 100 000 million tonnes.
