Modern Mining June 2016

MINING News

First sale of Lerala diamonds imminent

again being put on care and maintenance. KDL acquired the project – which has a 20,1 Mt resource at an average grade of 24,2 cpht – in early 2014 and has upgraded the plant to reliably treat and recover dia- monds at a nominal rate of 200 t/h. Some 1,4 Mt/a of ore will be processed to pro- duce an average of 336 000 carats annually. The mine life is nine years. 

ASX-listed Kimberley Diamonds Ltd (KDL) says that the first sale of diamonds recov- ered from its newly operating Lerala diamond mine in Botswana will be held by online auction from Antwerp, Belgium, towards the end of this month (June). KDL reported in April that its mining contractor, Basil Read Mining Botswana, had started open-pit mining operations at Lerala and announced in May that ore production had commenced, which it described as the culmination of a nine-month project to upgrade and com- mission the mine. The deposit at Lerala comprises a clus- ter of five diamond-bearing kimberlites – designated K2 to K6 – which were origi- nally discovered by De Beers in the early 1990s. Although De Beers undertook trial mining, it was left to Australian company DiamonEx to develop a mine at the site, with commissioning taking place in 2008. The global financial crisis led to the mine being placed on care and maintenance

within months of its opening. A third company, Mantle Diamonds, operated the mine for a few months in 2012 producing approximately 73 000 carats. A range of technical issues in the processing plant, however, resulted in poor recovery and led to the mine once

First kimberlite ore being mined and hauled from the K3 pit at Lerala (photo: KDL).

June 2016  MODERN MINING  11