Botswana Minerals plc says its AI-assisted review of historical exploration data has confirmed its copper geological model on the company’s licences, identifying chalcopyrite, a primary copper sulphide, in historical drill core from holes originally drilled in the search for uranium and diamonds.
The AIM- and Botswana Stock Exchange-listed copper and diamond explorer stated that alongside the primary chalcopyrite, the historical records show altered copper minerals, including malachite and chrysocolla.
The company said in a market update that together, these directly confirm the AI-generated target corridors and strengthen the model for concealed copper and base metal mineralisation beneath Kalahari cover.
The significance of AI in this application is its ability to recover and connect this evidence from more than a gigabyte of records spanning over fifty years and several separate exploration campaigns within a matter of days, work that would be impractical to do manually, turning overlooked legacy data into a focused field programme.
Botswana Minerals Chairman, John Teeling, praised AI following the discovery saying this is exactly how it should work in mineral exploration.
“The initial AI analysis identified prospective copper corridors; the review of historical core and logs then provided direct mineral evidence, in the form of chalcopyrite, that confirms the model,” he said.
Teeling highlighted that the copper was not sitting in one neat modern database, but was dispersed across decades of reports, more than a gigabyte of them, from both uranium and diamond explorers.
“AI helped us find, connect and understand that evidence in its proper geological context, which simply would not have been practical to do by hand,” he added.
“We now have primary copper mineralisation, altered copper minerals and a confirmed geological model, a material step forward for the Company. Our next step is to accelerate the northern licence work, get into the field, re-log and re-scan available core, and continue building out the opportunity across the southern licences.”
According to the company, fieldwork in the northern licences will be accelerated by prioritising and ranking the targets, enabling rapid mobilisation on the highest‑value prospects while also undertaking field checks over the highest-priority copper, zinc, lead and nickel corridors, including mapping, sampling and validation of historical drill locations.
Botswana Minerals’ northern Botswana licences have a long exploration history dating back to the 1970s, with work by Rio Tinto, Falconbridge, Mount Burgess, Tsodilo/Gcwihaba, Kavango Minerals and others. This included both uranium and diamond exploration. The diamond drilling is valuable because it penetrated the Kalahari cover and recorded the basement rocks beneath it.