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DIAMONDS
March 2015
MODERN MINING
25
mid-tier diamond miner
Gem quality diamonds
recovered at Baoulé.
Mining operations at Baoulé
in February this year.
years with Southern Era, which at that time
owned the Marsfontein diamond mine in
South Africa.
Smithson describes Baoulé – located in
the Aredor diamond district of Guinea – as
an attractive deposit which could ultimately
evolve into a mid-size open-pit mine. “The pipe
is 5 ha in extent and was discovered in 1999
by a Canadian company,” he says. “It was sub-
sequently drilled and bulk sampled by, among
others, Rio Tinto. We acquired the project with
a local partner in late 2013 and our work since
then – all internal and non-JORC compliant at
this stage – points to us having a plus 20 Mt
resource containing 3,3 million carats. We’re
hoping to do a bit more drilling this year to get
to 5 million carats.
“We’re expecting to get a good price for
Baoulé’s diamonds. We believe at least US$200
per carat is possible for the long term run of
mine given that a small parcel of diamonds
sold in 2000 by a previous operator yielded
US$157 per carat. The really interesting point
is whether Baoulé can deliver large stones.
Alluvial miners in the area have recovered
a number of stones of over 100 carats and a
couple exceeding 200 carats, one of 284 carats
and another of 255 carats, so we are optimistic
that our kimberlite could be a
large stone producer.”
After relocating the
requisite plant and
e q u i pme n t f r om
Mandala (and a sec-
ond Stellar project in
Guinea, Droujba) in
the second and third
quarters of last year,
Stellar started trial
mining in the eastern
lobe at Baoulé in October.
Says Smithson: “Our strat-
egy over the next year or so will
be to mine at a rate sufficient to
deliver between 100 000 and 200 000 tonnes
of kimberlite to the plant over this period and
we would expect this could yield up to 2 000
carats per month over the course of 2015. The
trial mining – apart from generating cash flow
– will give us a good handle not only on grade
and value but also the frequency and distribu-
tion of large stones. All this data will inform
our decision as to whether or not we should
proceed to mining on a commercial scale.
Our current thinking is that commercial min-
ing would see the tonnage mined and treated