Prospect's 400m Step-Out Confirms Copper Continuation at Mumbezhi

Prospect Resources (ASX:PSC) drilled a hole 400 metres west of its Nyungu Central resource at the Mumbezhi project in Zambia. The step-out hit copper continuation. That single result changes how the company reads the deposit's potential scale.

Resource development manager James Winch described the geology with a folded-paper analogy. Picture a sheet folded over on itself. The green fold horizons trace the rock package, and the yellow mineralised envelopes sit inside it. Where the limbs duplicate, the copper-bearing horizon repeats. Nyungu Central is not one blanket of copper. It is a series of stacked, tabular sulphide lodes, typical of the Central African Copperbelt. Copper sits as chalcopyrite in fresh rock under a thin oxide-transition cap. The defined deposit already runs over 1.5 kilometres of strike. It stays open to the north in fresh sulphides.

The step-out west lines up with airborne EM conductors and ground IP geophysics. The hole fits the model, and the model now guides where rigs go next.

Prospect lifted Mumbezhi's resource to 208.1 million tonnes at 0.42% copper in May, for about 877,000 tonnes of contained copper across Nyungu Central, West Mwombezhi, and Kabikupa. More than 40% sits in the higher-confidence Indicated category. Maiden gold and cobalt by-product credits were defined at Nyungu Central and West Mwombezhi. Those credits should pull forecast operating costs lower on the global cost curve, the company said.

The same Copperbelt system under Nyungu built Barrick's Lumwana mine 40 kilometres up the road. Barrick spent years drilling along strike and at depth, kept hitting the system past where it thought the edges were, and turned that into a US$2 billion "Super Pit" expansion now pushing mine life beyond 60 years. Prospect argues Mumbezhi can follow a similar path.