Joe:
I was hoping somebody more knowledgeable would want to answer your question but I can give it a try.
My first venture in the diamond business, a few years ago, was with Southernera. I also follow Aber, Ashton and Rex.
That quote from the Globe and Mail is very good advice to investors but it limits them to companies in the last phases of exploration which are using 2mm screens to have an official number of stones weighing over 3/4 of a carat. The law of averages also means that you need large tonnage to obtain a significant number of stones that size.
KRT is not there yet. The reason it has been moving slowly is of course due to the loss of focus in 1996-1997.
The news release seems to indicate however that this is the next question they want to address as they start phase II of their exploration program.
The 68.8% gem stones comprise 95.3% of the total stone value recovered to date. The largest diamond recovered to date weighs 0.985 carats.
I picked up on the following sentence, in the Tracer Recovery Program section of the last news release, because fragmentation was also mentioned in the September news release re. a 1.6mm stone : "The impact on the value of diamonds associated with fragmentation of stones during the drilling and sample collection process will also be assessed." Investors may get more information later on that would better answer your question.
There was an article in the Toronto Star in mid-March concerning fragmentation during the drilling process in connection with Tandem Resources, I believe. Fragmentation has also been an issue for Ashton and Mountain Province:
"Ashton has revealed that most of the macro diamonds were generally clear but broken stones. The two largest macros had maximum dimensions of 2.6 mm and 2.55 mm, and weighed 0.0715 and 0.0405 carats respectively. According to Ashton exploration VP, Wayne Hillier, these two stones were nearly whole, had inclusions, and had irregular shapes due to resorption. The absence of ilmenites in the K14C kimberlite has made assessment of the resorption index impossible. The broken nature of most of the macros reminds us of the 5034 pipe, whose macros obtained from diamond drilling were mainly fragments. Mountain Province never publicly addressed the high level of fragmentation of its macros, which according to Chris Jennings of Southernera was considerably worse than the 15-20% fragmentation level normally found and attributable to the emplacement process. Ashton, however, has examined the broken stones carefully and concluded that the breakage is definitely not due to the emplacement process, and very unlikely due to its processing procedures. Ashton strongly believes that the hammering effect of the reverse circulation drill used to extract the sample broke the diamonds. No attempt has yet been made to estimate original stone sizes or reassemble fragments, so we don't know if they all came from one crushed radish or lots of small stones. In any case, the conclusion we can draw is that K14C has a high number of clear macro diamonds for a relatively small sample, and that is the all-important information needed to blow the lid off the Buffalo Head diamond play."
Premium Kaiser Express - Friday, September 12, 1997
A big part of the fascination for diamond exploration is that they seem like the essence of life: combinations of carbon so mysterious in their origin, so strong and at the same time so fragile... or does that sound too much like a DeBeer commercial? <<G>>.
"In Dr. Rombouts' opinion, it is reasonable to expect that the average carat price for many of the Fort a la Corne kimberlites could be in the US$50 to US$100 range, particularly since his statistical studies of the microdiamond analytical data indicate that several kimberlite bodies could have the potential to contain larger and better quality stones than those generally recovered from the minibulk samples to date."
Will KRT close the gap between the expectations of the world's best renowned expert and last year's drilling results? That's where speculation has its place... and often its rewards. |
