Firestone Diamonds plc expects to reach its mining target of 325,000 tons in October 2009 at the BK11 projects in Botswana.
In March 2009 Firestone announced an inferred resource of 12 million tonnes containing approximately 830,000 carats with an overall modelled value of $123/carat. In July 2009 the Company announced that the modelled value had increased to $135/carat and that work on the final phase of evaluation on BK11 had commenced. Substantial progress has since been made.
The objective of the final phase of evaluation is to process a bulk sample of approximately 20,000 tonnes and recover a sufficiently large parcel of diamonds in order for a high confidence diamond valuation to be obtained. This data is expected to be sufficient to allow a mine development decision to be made by the end of the year.
Firestone expects to be in a position to make a decision to commence mine development based on the results of this work in Q4 2009, as planned, subject to which production is expected to commence in mid 2010.
Much of the infrastructure that has been established to support the pilot production plant has been designed to support full scale mining operations, which will reduce the time and cost of mine development.
Philip Kenny, CEO of Firestone Diamonds, commented: “We are very pleased with the progress that we have made since July. We continue to work towards making a mine development decision on BK11 and to signing an agreement with Debswana on the Jwaneng tailings project before the end of the year. With the Company fully financed to production at BK11, and with prices in the rough diamond market continuing to recover from their recent lows, we remain confident about Firestone’s prospects.”
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- Diamond Miners Firestone and Tawana Sign Botswana Joint Venture Agreement
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