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Zambian copper and cobalt Project

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In the North-Western province in Zambia, Arc’s licenses in which it has controlling interests are located in the Domes region of the Zambian copperbelt near world-class mines such as First Quantum Minerals’ Sentinel and Kansanshi copper mines and Barrick’s Lumwana mine .
Arc, via its Zambian subsidiaries, has a controlling stake over large areas under licence located on the opposite flank of the Kabompo Dome to First Quantum’s Sentinel operations. In Botswana, through its Botswanan subsidiary, it has a controlling stake over 215km2 of area under license located within 15km and 38km respectively of Cupric Canyons’ Zone 5 Copper-Silver Project and. north-east and along strike of Sandfire Resources NL T3 Copper-Silver Project.

Location: Zambia

Areas under license: Small-Scale Mining License 8248-HQ-SML; Small-Scale Exploration License 23243-Q-SEL; Large-Scale Exploration License 19906-HQ-LEL; Large-Scale Exploration License 23004-HQ-LEL and Large-Scale Exploration License 23005-HQ-LEL.

Interest:Controlling

Commodity/ies:Co Cu

Stage: Exploration

Location: Botswana

Areas under license: Exploration Licence PL135/2017 (142.89 km2); Exploration Licence PL162/2017 (72.6km2).

Interests:Controlling

Commodity/ies:Co Ag

Stage: Exploration

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The Zambian license areas are located approximately 900 km from Lusaka, in Mwinilunga, Northwestern Province, and is well within the trending arm of the major geological structure known as the Lufilian Arc (Copperbelt), on the western flank of the Kabompo Dome. The Copperbelt is home to all the major copper mines in Zambia and these licenses represent one of the last dome-related areas in Zambia yet to be explored in any detail.

Over the last twenty years, three new major copper mines have been developed and constructed to exploit the mineral resources in the new western part of the Zambian Copperbelt. This region now accounts for a substantial part of Zambian copper production and the areas under license are in close proximity to large operations such as First Quantum Minerals’ Sentinel and Kansanshi mines and Barrick Gold’s Lumwana mine.

The areas under license were previously explored by Equinox Minerals Limited (“Equinox”) and Anglo American Prospecting Services (“AAPS”) by way of the Zambezi Joint Venture’ (“JV”) through AAPS's affiliate Zamanglo Prospecting Ltd (“Anglo American”) during the late 1990s as part of the Kabompo Project.

The current areas under license encompass 9 of 30 exploration targets that were ranked in the late-90’s by the JV over the Kabompo Project, which include the top seven ranked targets. First Quantum Minerals’ Kalumbila property, better known as the Trident Project, developed to become the Sentinel copper mine, which in 2020 achieved record copper production of over 251,000 tonnes. First Quantum's Enterprise Nickel project is also located on the flanks of the Kabompo Dome and approximately 40 km to the east of the areas under license.

At the time of the JV, Kalumbila was originally ranked number 22 out of JV’s top 30 Kabompo Project targets with an original exploration target size of six million tonnes of ore; eventually a copper Resource in excess of 1 billion tonnes of ore (one of the largest in Zambia) was demonstrated.

To date, Arc Minerals have carried out c.22,000m of drilling, collected and analysed c.75,000 soil samples, and flown 5,700 line km’s of airborne geophysical surveys over all the areas under license.