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Strategies & Market Trends : Dino's Bar & Grill -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Goose94 who wrote (46541)	7/22/2018 5:53:44 AM
From: Goose94	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 202886

Pangolin Diamonds (PAN-V) has agreed to terms of a joint venture arrangement covering the AK10 kimberlite in the Orapa kimberlite cluster in Botswana. The arrangement with Makanwu Civil Blasting Ltd. gives Pangolin the right to earn a 51-per-cent interest in the project by paying for a first phase of work on the pipe, and up to 75 per cent should Makanwu decline to pay its share in a second phase. Pangolin has also arranged a side deal with Amulet Diamonds Corp., giving that company a chance to participate in Pangolin's share of the project, once it has earned one, that is. To earn its 51-per-cent initial interest, Pangolin must complete a 10-point program within a year. Most of the steps are easy and inexpensive, including the compiling and assessment of historical information, a final data compilation for the program, ground geophysics over areas of interest, aerial photography, soil sampling and the like. (The historical data compilation will be brief unless the company has access to data not in the public domain, as very little is known about previous work on the pipe.) Some of the work is more labour and cash intensive. Those programs include determining the extent of the kimberlite through drilling, if necessary, although it is hard to imagine a way to determine its extent without drilling. As well, the plan calls for pitting, if necessary, to acquire near-surface kimberlite to a depth of 30 metres, and to process any kimberlite recovered through drilling and pitting for diamonds. (Again, it is difficult to imagine the pitting not being necessary, as a requirement of the first phase of work is that Pangolin produce a 500-carat parcel of diamonds.) The six-hectare AK10 pipe, which lies beneath nine metres of sand and overburden, was discovered through geophysics in 1968 by De Beers. The company subsequently established that it was diamondiferous, although to what extent is unknown. The pipe lies in a tight cluster, with BK11, a failed mine by Firestone Diamonds PLC, just 2,900 metres to the east-southeast. The Karowe mine, which has proven to be a cash cow for Lucara Diamond (LUC-T) is just four kilometres south of AK10. Firestone gave up on BK11 last year, selling it to Amulet for just over $5-million. Amulet is currently evaluating the pipe in the hope of reactivating the old mine. As a part of the less than definitive deal between the two companies, Dr. Daniels, Pangolin's president and chief executive officer, says that they have agreed that Amulet "should consider making available its small bulk sampling processing plant" for processing material from AK10. The fudge gets thicker, as the possible availability of the plant would be subject to a separate deal between the two companies. All the pipes in the area have a hefty diamond value. Even the failed BK11 mine contained diamonds worth at least $250 (U.S.) per carat and Karowe is averaging about $700 (U.S.) per carat at Karowe. The problem is grade. Karowe is an outlier, with an average grade of 16 carats per hundred tonnes when it went into production in 2013, and it is still handily topping 12 carats per hundred tonnes. Unfortunately, the "rich" core of BK11 averages less than seven carats per hundred tonnes and other pipes in the area test near or below that value.