Whiteflash-Diamond Playground

From Mining Weekly - The gap between the demand for, and the supply of, diamonds is set to widen from 2008, thanks mainly to a surging demand in India and China, Tawana Resources MD Wolf Marx said last week. He added that the size of the diamond-consuming market in the two Asian countries is expected to grow from 33-million con- sumers to 65-million consumers by 2015. In another development, he said the worldwide budget for diamond exploration had risen from $250-mil- lion in 2002 to $850-million in 2006, adding that many of the current diamond mines were beyond their production peaks, and exploration and acquisition focus was shifting back to Africa, where there was a new diamond rush. The company recently announced that larger-than-expected diamonds had been recovered during the first week of the processing of the initial bulk sample collected at its Riverton kimberlite project, in South Africa. Marx said that the company had processed about 1500 t. ”We’re processing the kimberlite in phases, with the 6-mm free milling material being processed first. The oversized material, 6 mm to 16 mm, is stockpiled for processing later. We currently don’t have the complete results for the material excavated and we simply don’t know the final grade and diamond quality yet. However, the diamonds recovered so far from the 6-mm fractions from certain areas of the kimberlite are, on average, larger than one would expect from a kimberlite.” He stressed that the results were way beyond expectations, as the average stone size of diamonds recovered from kimber-lites in Kimberley, in the Northern Cape, is between 0,2 ct and 0,25 ct a stone. “However, the average size for the stones we’ve recovered so far from the main portion of the kimberlite exceeds this. It really came as a surprise. We have been told by people associated with past diggings that there are no proper records of previous diggings, but, in their words, there are stones of ‘good’ size. Of ‘good’ size in the Kimberley region means that they are similar to the diamonds from the alluvials in the Vaal river, which are known to be big stones,” said Marx. He added that there had been a distinct shift in the attention of global diamond investors away from places like Canada and Australia towards Botswana, one of the lowest-risk countries for exploration and mining and foreign investment, not only in Africa, but also worldwide. “The success rate in finding commercially viable diamond deposits is second to none and that includes junior explorers who have had quite spectacular successes. “So I think there will be renewed attention on Tawana and certainly we’ll be pursuing the Orapa project in Botswana and our other Southern African projects very vigorously,” concluded Marx.