TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Explorer Peregrine Diamonds is the first junior mining company to become a member of the Diamond Bourse of Canada (DBC), joining the ranks of diamond major De Beers Canada, among others.

The DBC was a central commodity exchange facility and a network that brought together buyers and sellers and provided them with the value-added services that enhanced their competitive capabilities.

Peregrine was currently focused on looking for and developing diamond deposits in Canada's North. To date, 71 kimberlites had been discovered at its wholly owned Chidliak project, 120 km from Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut.

The company's current work programme was focused on confirming diamond resources in the CH-7 and CH-44 kimberlites and to increase the size of the CH-6 diamond resource. As part of this programme, a 558.5 wet tonne bulk sample, collected through large diameter reverse circulation drilling, was completed at CH-7 this month.

The work programme was designed to collect data necessary to establish the grade of the different geologic units at CH-7, with the resulting representative diamond parcels being the subject of an independent diamond valuation. If results warranted, Peregrine would use this information, combined with previously acquired geologic and diamond data, to prepare a maiden resource statement for CH-7 that would be included, along with the declared resource at CH-6, in the preliminary economic assessment scheduled for the first half of next year.

The average price determined in an independent diamond valuation of a 1 013.5 ct diamond parcel collected from the CH-6 kimberlite in 2013 was $213/ct. In January, Peregrine announced a revised independent inferred mineral resource for CH-6 of 8.57-million carats of diamonds in 3.32-million tonnes of kimberlite to a depth of 250 m, grading 2.58 ct/t.

Meanwhile, the 9 ha DO-27 kimberlite, on Peregrine's 72.1%-owned WO property, at its Lac de Gras project, in the Northwest Territories (NWT), hosted an indicated resource of 18.2-million carats of diamonds in 19.5-million tonnes of kimberlite at a grade of 0.94 ct/t. This resource, 27 km from Canada's largest diamond mine, Rio Tinto's Diavik, was open at depth and confirmed in 2008.

Peregrine also continued to evaluate earlier-stage diamond exploration projects it controlled in Nunavut and the NWT, and through undertaking a comprehensive evaluation of its extensive and proprietary diamond exploration databases, to discover new diamond districts in North America. One of the company’s critical assets for searching for a new Canadian diamond district was a proprietary database acquired from BHP Billiton, containing data from about 38 000 kimberlite indicator mineral samples that covered an area of Canada about three-million square kilometres in size.