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Gold/Mining/Energy : Canadian Diamond Play Cafi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: m.philli who wrote (256)	10/29/2002 9:24:24 AM
From: rdww	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16206

'typically' (I use that loosely), commercial is over 1MM and sometimes they now like to say over 1.5MM. Using 0.5MM for one dimension was the reporting std for quite some time in defining a macro, but that didn't mean that it was a mine starter. Ekati is supposedly using 0.4MM as a cutoff now, but I think they are selling the little little suckers to some particular mkt. Their total reserve is defined as: 58MM tonnes at 0.9cpt using 1.5MM cutoff. Ekati also uses 85MM litres of fuel each year and it comes in via a winter rd and all employees fly in on a 737 for a 2 week work shift.The word cheap doesn't come to mind when describing the operating costs associated with Ekati mine at all. The big guys are more focused on finding avg sized stones that pay for the overhead and finding the biggies is a bonus that makes it all worth while

To: m.philli who wrote (256)	10/30/2002 10:00:31 AM
From: rdww	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16206

here's an excerpt of the will p comments I mentioned earlier from a blurb he did on a company playing in the temagami area "The De Beers Victor project is quite some distance east of the Superior project, but it remains the best shot for an Ontario diamond mine, and it has increased interest in the area now being examined by Superior. Progress at Victor has been excruciatingly slow however. The pipe was discovered in the latter half of the 1980s, but it was not mini-bulk sampled until 1997. That test processed about 330 tonnes of kimberlite, and about 108 carats of diamonds were recovered, for an indicated grade of 0.33 carat per tonne. The grade was quite modest, but the diamond value apparently was toward the upper end of the scale, as the stones were reportedly worth $154 (U.S.) per carat. That was encouraging, as Victor could contain nearly 40 million tonnes of kimberlite. De Beers mulled that result over for a few years, then decided to proceed with a much larger test. In 2000, De Beers extracted about 10,000 tonnes of kimberlite from the large pipe, and it was processed last year. De Beers was typically tight-mouthed about the result, but rumours suggest that the bulk sample produced a grade somewhere between 0.25 carat per tonne and 0.45 carat per tonne. Both figures are probably accurate over at least a portion of the body, which is believed to contain different facies of kimberlite, with different diamond grades. Whatever the grade and value of Victor, De Beers thinks enough of the project that it continues to advance it toward a feasibility study, although the pace continues to be slow. Victor is just one of about 18 kimberlites that De Beers found on its Attawapiskat property, but Victor was the only one that displayed any real economic promise"