Andrada Mining has revealed plans to open additional mines in Namibia to capitalise on the growing global demand for green transition metals such as tin, tantalum, and lithium.
Andrada Mining Chief Executive Officer, Anthony Viljoen, expressed confidence in Namibia’s mining potential.
“We’ve always been very bullish on Namibia, not only as an investment destination, but also from a geological point of view. When we started prospecting there, we were looking at the historic mining operations, and we’re very proud that what we’ve done and what we’ve contributed to Namibia has started to come to the fore. What we’re looking at now is expanding our footprint and opening more mines in Namibia and becoming a critical minerals champion for the future,” Viljoen said.
Andrada is also focusing on the by-product potential of its existing operations, particularly at its flagship Uis Tin Mine, where lithium has emerged as a promising co-product alongside tin.
“Similarly, at Uis, we’ve done a lot of work in terms of the by-product potential of mining lithium alongside the tin, and hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, we’ll be able to bring to the market exactly how we’re going to do that and integrate the lithium into our circuit. So, very exciting times on the lithium side, now with two projects,” he said.
Viljoen said Andrada is engaging with its existing financiers to scale up operations at Uis without having to develop entirely new sites — a move that could accelerate production while minimising environmental and financial risk.
Additionally, the company is eyeing several nearby pits that were previously mined by Iscor. These areas are now seen as promising new sources of tin and associated critical minerals.
“At one stage, Uis was the largest hard-rock opencast tin mine in the world, and outside of the existing pit that we’re mining, there are a number of proximal pits that were mined by Iscor back in the day. We see a lot of potential to start mining those other pits. Also, there’s a lot of tin in the geological system around that region, so we see an opportunity to start a concurrent production line without disturbing our existing operations at the Uis plant,” he said.
In April, Andrada reported that initial drilling in the previously mined areas of Uis had reaffirmed the scale and quality of pegmatites within a 3 km radius of Uis’ existing processing plant.
Tin, lithium oxide and tantalum intersections were described as highlighting the opportunity to augment major tin production with the added advantage of lithium and tantalum as value-enhancing co-products.
