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MODERN MINING
January 2015
DIAMONDS
Top projects
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
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.