Why we’re planning to drill from underground at Golden Valley

CALGARY, Canada (Feb. 26, 2024)—The historic gold mine at Golden Valley, in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland province, allows Pambili to explore the project’s bulk mining gold potential using underground drilling.

This is typically a much more cost-effective method of taking intersections from an ore body for analysis than drilling from the surface.

When drilling from the surface, drillers often have to penetrate large amounts of waste rock before they reach the ore body—the actual target for the hole.

When the right conditions are in place—as Pambili believes they are at Golden Valley, due to the project’s underground mine workings—underground drilling can bypass this potential waste rock and get to the ore body much more quickly, and at lower cost per metre.

Underground drilling can therefore gather much more data about an ore body and its mineral potential than surface drilling for the same number of drill meters.

The animation above lays the comparison out in more detail.