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Tapiwanashe Mangwiro-Senior Budiness Reporter

Prospect Resources — through its wholly -owned subsidiary, Promin Resource Holdings — has announced the acquisition of a potential high grade lithium deposit, Step Aside Mine.

Step Aside Mine is located 8km from Prospect’s primary investment in the country, Arcadia Mine.

“The Step Aside claim comprises approximately 140 hectares and is located in the Harare Greenstone belt, west of the Mashonganyika fault. The potential of the area has been confirmed by positive regional stream and soil sample geochemistry results,” Prospect said in its 2021 financial report.

Prospect said at Step Aside, four mineralised pegmatites have been mapped from east to west within a meta-dolerite host rock and these mineralised pegmatites are all roughly parallel to each other, lying in a north-south orientation and have dip angles of 40-45˚ to the west.

Pegmatites are extreme igneous rocks that form during the final stage of a magma’s crystallisation.

“Exploration programme is underway with the commencement of rock chip sampling and if successful, a trenching and drilling exercise will be done to help with determining the sub-surface strike extensions will. This will provide greater detail as to the thickness and strike length of any potential underlying pegmatite,” the company added.

Meanwhile, following a rock chip sampling programme to investigate the potential prospectivitiy of the Chishanya Carbonatite Project (Chishanya) for economic rare earth element concentrations, Prospect said it does not plan to undertake any further exploration activities on this project.

In 2018, Prospect had announced the commencement of exploration at its Chishanya carbonatite project in southeastern Zimbabwe.

Then in August 2021, the company announced it had identified significant-sized rare earth elements (REE) anomalies at the project. 

REE refers to a group of 17 chemically similar elements, including the 15 elements in the Lanthanide series, and also scandium and yttrium because of their similar properties.

However, the company has now announced that its knowledge gained at Chishanya has assisted the team in understanding the regional geology and Prospect is evaluating other early-stage projects in Zimbabwe for their prospectivity for rare earth elements.

The Prospect exploration team is said to be continuing to develop a pipeline of prospective battery mineral targets both locally and within the region. 

The publicity around the transaction with Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt has resulted in an increase in opportunities being presented to the Prospect team.

Prospect recently executed a binding Share Sale Agreement (SSA) with Huayou International Mining for the sale of its 87 percent shareholding in Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe and they declared that they are ready to invest the proceeds in other similar investments.

In an interview earlier in March, managing director Sam Hossack said, “We are proposing to retain about A$30-million to A$60-million to take the existing team and look at some of the other assets we have been working through to do a similar exercise to Arcadia again.”

We know Zimbabwe and it is very prospective. 

“Our team is mostly made up of Zimbabweans and we have a world-class team of Zimbabweans that live in Australia and have a really strong network and technical and geotechnical understanding of Zimbabwe in terms of the country’s geology and operations,” he added.