JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – West Africa-focused diamond development company Stellar Diamonds on Tuesday reported that its Baoulé kimberlite pipe in Guinea had yielded 2 145 ct, to date, through trial mining.

This included 138 diamonds greater than 1 ct and numerous gem diamonds larger than 5 ct and up to 9.2 ct.

“This would suggest that the pipe is host to a large stone size distribution and justifies the strategy of trial mining 100 000 t to 200 000 t of kimberlite over the coming year to determine the presence of large, high-value stones in the pipe. Gem and near-gem diamonds represent almost 60% of the diamond population recovered,” the company said in a statement.

Trial mining of the eastern lobe of the 5 ha Baoulé kimberlite pipe continued to progress well and the processing plant was running at a steady-state average capacity of 50 t/h.

The 75%-owned project was now expected to deliver monthly production of 2 000 ct at an average grade of 15 carats per hundred tons.

"We are pleased with the ongoing progress of the trial mining at Baoulé. The regular occurrence of larger gem-quality stones is highly encouraging, as is maintaining our target plant processing capacity and run-of-mine grade to achieve our objective of processing 2 000 ct/m during [this year],” the Aim-listed company’s CE Karl Smithson commented.

DIAMOND SALE
Stellar would, this month, undertake the sale of a parcel of 5 900 ct of diamonds, comprising 2 200 ct recovered at Baoulé and 3 700 ct recovered at other projects and being stored as inventory in Antwerp, in Belgium.

“The planned sale will be scheduled for later in January, when buying activity resumes in Antwerp after the end-of-year break,” said Smithson.

The company was also planning to export and sell diamonds from the operation every two months to generate regular cash flow, as well as to determine with a high degree of confidence the diamond grade, value and frequency of large, high-value diamonds from the Baoulé kimberlite pipe.