Modern Mining January 2015

DIAMONDS

Million-carat-a-year mine on

Lesotho is well on its way to getting its first truly high volume (in terms of carat production) diamond mine, with AIM-quoted Firestone Diamonds already well into the construction phase of its US$185,4 million Liqhobong mine in the Maloti mountains. Liqhobong is designed to deliver 1,1 million carats a year over 15 years starting in 2016, which is roughly 10 times what nearby Letšeng – Lesotho’s best known mine – produces (although the dollar price per carat of Letšeng’s stones is the highest of any producing kimberlite in the world). Modern Mining’s Arthur Tassell recently spoke to Firestone’s CEO, Stuart Brown (right), to learn more about the Liqhobong project, which can claim to be virtually the only real ‘greenfield’ diamond mine development of any substance currently underway in the Southern African region.

S ome might argue with the charac- terisation of Liqhobong as a green- field project as it has a history of commercial mining but, as Brown points out, Firestone has removed the previous pilot plant that was in use – intermittently – from around 2005 to 2013 and is essentially starting afresh at the site. “To all intents and purposes, this is a greenfield de- velopment and we have salvaged very little from the previous plant, which was sold for

scrap and removed from the mine earlier this year (2014) at no cost to Firestone,” he says. “We are replacing it with a large custom-built plant with a capacity of 500 t/h – or 3,6 Mt/a – which will be entirely new and based on mod- ern, well-proven technology.” The Liqhobong kimberlites – there is a main pipe and a satellite pipe – were discovered in the late 1950s but remained unexploited (other than by operations of an artisanal nature) until 2005 when European Diamonds (later Kopane

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56  MODERN MINING  January 2015