The Selebi Mine Project consists of a single 10-year mining licence covering an area of 11,504 ha located south of the town of Selebi Phikwe. With a population of approximately 52,000, the town is located roughly 410 km northeast of the national capital, Gaborone and 150 km southeast of Francistown.
The Selebi Mine Project includes two shafts, (Selebi and Selebi North) and related infrastructure (rail, power and water). The shafts are roughly 6 km apart. Shaft sinking at Selebi started in 1970 with mining commencing in 1980 and concluding in October 2016 when the operations were placed on care and maintenance due to a failure in the offsite Phikwe processing facility. The Selebi Mines were placed under liquidation in 2017.
PNRL submitted an indicative offer to the liquidators in June 2020 to acquire the assets of the former producing BCL Mining Complex. On February 10, 2021, PNRL was selected as the preferred bidder and in March 2021, entered into a memorandum of understanding providing for a six-month exclusivity period to complete additional work and negotiate the final asset purchase agreement.
On January 31, 2022, PNRL completed the purchase of Selebi Mines Project and have since began the process to accurately re-characterize the remaining resources including drill testing near mine, high-conductance borehole electromagnetic exploration targets, resource in-fill drilling, additional metallurgical testing, and early scoping studies.
It is PNRL’s ambition to redevelop the Selebi Mines Project through modernization and a commitment to best practices in safety and the environment. This includes the evaluation of alternative metallurgical processes to produce separate copper and nickel-cobalt commercial concentrates using less power and water to reach an exportable commodity and have a much lower environmental impact when compared to the legacy processing and smelting.
The nickel copper-cobalt resources remaining at these mines will be developed for the global electrification industry and the Company is diligently working on establishing that significant exploration upside potential remains in the Selebi North and Selebi Main deposits.
