[miningmx.com] — GEM Diamonds has been awarded a mining licence for the Gope diamond deposit situated in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve and plans to start production in 2013.
According to a company statement details of the mine plan and “the relevant staged capital expenditure’ will be released at the time of the announcement of the company’s 2010 results on March 15.’
Development of Gope would make it the third new diamond mine which has either recently started production or has reached the development stage in Botswana.
UK-listed Firestone Diamonds brought its BK11 mine near Orapa in northern Botswana into commercial production in July last year.
Toronto-listed Lucara Diamond Corporation is planning to start production from its AK6 mine by the end of 2011 and ramp up to full production early in 2012.
Lucara acquired AK6 from African Diamonds. The mine is also situated in northern Botswana about five kilometres from Firestone’s BK11 mine.
A fourth mine – Lerala situated near Martins Drift on Botswana’s north-eastern border with South Africa – started operations in August 2008 but was shut down almost immediately because of the collapse of the diamond market at the end of that year.
The Gope kimberlite is overlain by some 80m of Kalahari sand and the Gem Diamonds statement said an underground mine is being planned “to improve the company’s knowledge of the orebody.’
Gem had previously stated that an underground mine was being looked at because it would significantly reduce the capital cost of the development.
According to Gem CEO Clifford Elphick , “the Gem Diamonds board will shortly be looking to approve construction of the initial phase at Gope which aims to start production in 2013 in order to begin to take advantage of the rising rough diamond market.’
According to the Gem Diamonds website, Gope contains a resource of 20.5m carats with a total in-situ value of US$3.3bn based on an average resource diamond price of $162 a carat.
