VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – Takeover target Kennady Diamonds has started work on a 10 500 m 2018 winter drilling campaign at the Kennady North diamond project, in Canada's Northwest Territories.
Subject to a friendly C$176-million takeover offer by TSX- and Nasdaq-listed diamond producer Mountain Province Diamonds that was announced last week, the diamond drilling is expected to be split 60% to testing high-priority grassroots exploration targets and 40% to delineation and geotechnical drilling on the Faraday kimberlites.
The programme is slated to run until at least mid-May, but might be extended should ice conditions allow for safe drilling, the company advised.
"What is particularly exciting is that the majority of the budgeted drilling is directed at high-priority exploration targets that we have waited to test for a number of years as evaluation work on the Kelvin and Faraday kimberlites took priority. The delineation drilling programme is designed to prepare for the next phase of bulk sampling that will extend the Faraday 2 resource along strike to the northwest, as well as upgrade the northeast limb of the Faraday 1 to 3 complex from a target for further exploration to an inferred resource," president and CEO Dr Rory Moore stated in a news release.
According to Kennady, field crews were mobilised to open the Kelvin camp on January 29, and start construction of the ice infrastructure. The ice infrastructure includes an ice airstrip, a spur road linking Kelvin camp to the Gahcho Kuè spur road, and an ice road to the Faraday kimberlites. Drill crews are currently mobilising into the Kelvin camp and the company expects the first of two core drills to start drilling within the next week, with the second following shortly thereafter.
Work will also resume on an environmental baseline study that was started in 2017, as well as a new programme to evaluate the geochemical behaviour of the kimberlites and associated country rock that might be expected in a mining scenario.