Botswana will soon open a zinc mine along Botswana-Namibia boarder at a place known as Kihabe, west of Nokaneng in the North West District.

The project started in 1983 but due to its remoteness within Botswana and the struggle for independence in Namibia through the 1980s, the project was inactive.

Mount Burgess Mining applied for a prospecting licence at Kihabe for 1969/03 and was granted and if all went according to plan, the project would be scheduled to commence production around November 2008, the company news states.

The prospecting licence covered a fault-bounded basin where potential exists for sediment-hosted base and precious metals deposits and nuclear fuels in the form of Carnotite, says the statement from the companys website.

The company says recent drilling by Mount Burgess mining into a 2.4km long base metals anomaly confirmed the presence of significant zones of zinc, lead and silver with credits for copper (0.34 per cent) and vanadium.

Mount Burgess Mining requested both Namibian and Botswana governments to open the Dobe boarder gate near Tsumkwe in Namibia, which was the companys base for diamond exploration.

With these developments in place, remoteness of the project was no longer an issue as it could be accessed either from Nokaneng along the Maun/ Shakawe Road or 120km road of gravel from Tsumkwe in Namibia through the Dobe boarder gate, 15km north of the project.

A statement from Mount Burgess Mining, Chief Executive Officer, Nigel Forrester in Australia, indicates that there is significant zinc, lead and silver wealth in the order of 11 million tonnes calculated to a depth of 150 metres with some extensions to 190 metres.

The planned project schedule was to follow a pre-feasibility study that commenced in July 2006 and completed in December the same year and the feasibility study started in January this year and will be completed in July.

Based upon a positive bankable feasibility study and approval to commence mining, the project finance will be sought for design and construction. Recently, during the Botswana Resource Sector Conference in Gaborone, Mr Forrester told delegates that due to sustained growth in countries such as China and India zinc was in high demand.

Some projects in China are reputed to have been postponed because of zinc shortage, he had said.

Mr Forrester had also said other developments taking place in China are that 345 million people were expected to move from rural areas to cities by 2020 and that 110 extra civil air ports were planned by 2015 as well as 15 000 kilometres of extra railways by 2010 and all these would need the use of zinc despite its price rise.