Erongo Copper Exploration

Why Namibia

Quintel’s stated strategy is to replace every tonne of copper it mines. Buying developed assets at the top of a copper cycle is the expensive way to do that. Finding them is the cheap way, and it is also the slow, uncertain, mostly unsuccessful way — which is precisely why the group allocates a fixed, modest percentage of operating cash flow to exploration rather than a variable amount that rises and falls with the copper price.

Namibia was selected for three reasons: prospective and under-explored Neoproterozoic stratigraphy on the same craton margin that hosts the Central African Copperbelt; a mineral licensing regime that is transparent, administered on published timelines and has never expropriated a licence; and existing infrastructure — the Walvis Bay corridor — that the group already uses for Zambian copper exports.

The geological thesis

The target model is sediment-hosted stratiform copper in the Damara Supergroup, in a reduced-facies setting analogous to the Copperbelt but developed on the southern margin of the Congo Craton. Historical work in the region concentrated on outcropping showings; the group’s thesis is that the prospective horizon continues beneath 40 to 120 metres of Kalahari sand cover that earlier explorers could not see through and did not test.

A regional airborne electromagnetic and gravity survey flown in 2023 mapped the basin architecture beneath that cover for the first time, identifying nine conductive targets on the interpreted redox boundary. Scout drilling in 2024 intersected copper mineralisation at three of them, including 34 metres at 1.41% copper from 168 metres at the target now named Otjiwa.

Programme summary

How we explore

Exploration is the part of mining where a company’s honesty is easiest to test, because the results are numbers and the numbers either continue or they do not. Quintel reports drilling results in full, including the holes that fail, and publishes intercepts with the full assay interval rather than selected high-grade sub-intervals.

Access agreements are negotiated with communal conservancy committees and commercial farmers before a drill rig moves, not after. Drill sites are rehabilitated within 90 days of completion, water for drilling is trucked rather than abstracted locally in a country where groundwater is scarce and contested, and every sump is lined and backfilled.

The programme employs 46 people, 41 of them Namibian, and uses a Namibian drilling contractor and a Namibian sample preparation laboratory with umpire assays at an accredited international laboratory.

What happens next

The FY2026 programme concentrates 22,000 metres of drilling on the Otjiwa corridor, where mineralisation has now been traced over 2.4 kilometres of strike and remains open in both directions. A maiden mineral resource estimate is targeted for 2027 if drill density and grade continuity support one.

The group makes no claim that Erongo will become a mine. Most exploration programmes do not. What can be said is that the target is real, the stratigraphy is prospective, the ground is held 100% and the drilling is funded through 2027 regardless of the copper price.