Having bought some time by securing a 3-year retention licence for the Gope diamond project in the central Kalahari district of Botswana, equal joint-venture partners
The retention licence, which came into effect Jan. 1, 2001, gives the joint venture the right to hold the project for another three years. Further extensions are possible. The Gope project is 260 km northeast of Gaborone and centres on the GO-25 kimberlite pipe, first discovered by Falco in 1981.
The GO-25 comprises 10 ha and contains an indicated resource of 77.3 million tonnes grading 20 carats per 100 tonnes, equivalent to 15.5 million carats, to a depth a 400 metres. The pipe lies buried beneath at least 70 metres of Kalahari sand cover. The top 40 metres of GO-25 consist of barren basalt breccia.
“Socio-economic and environmental concerns have added to the doubts associated with this project,” De Beers states in an April 2001 circular to shareholders.
The project also includes the smaller and less-explored macrodiamond-bearing GO-136 pipe, which comprises 5 ha.
Bulk-sampling was completed on the GO-25 pipe in 1996. As a result, 3,400 carats of diamonds were recovered from 18,000 tonnes of kimberlite collected by systematic underground sampling, diamond drilling and large-diameter surface drilling. The diamonds were estimated to be worth US$80 per carat, or US$16 per tonne.
A 1998 feasibility study examined a 4-million-tonne-per-year mining proposal that would yield in the order of 1 million carats annually. No details of the 12-month-long study were revealed.
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