De Beers in marine gold venture with AngloGold

A GOLD exploration venture with AngloGold Ashantioff SA’s west coast could be the answer for De Beers to extract diamonds from the seabed after a pure marine diamond mining venture did not yield expected carats or profit.

In what was touted as another major source of diamonds for De Beers in SA, the world’s largest diamond company secured rights over vast tracts of seabed, about 5000km  off the west coast, from which it could extract diamonds using its Peace In Africa ship to dredge the sea floor.

The grades have not proved to be as high as originally thought and De Beers has leased Peace In Africa to De Beers Marine Namibia Namdeb, the Namibian arm of De Beers, for six years, with an option to buy the ship, said Philip Barton, MD of De Beers Consolidated Mines.

“What we found was not what we thought was going to be there. Diamond prices then took a turn for the worse. Despite the increases now, it is not the most viable opportunity. We are not going to make money with Peace In Africa, so we’ve leased it to De Beers Marine Namibia,” he said.

De Beers is holding on to the South African Sea Areas despite its lack of diamond mining success and has bought into the Cape Town-based AuruMar joint venture it has with AngloGold.

A three-year exploration programme that is expected to end late next year is hunting for gold and other minerals on the seabed after De Beers turned up traces of these minerals.

It is possible that by mining gold and diamonds together, money could be made on the venture, but the way they will be extracted will not be with the use of a crawler ship like the highly specialised Peace In Africa, and some other method will have to be found, Mr Barton said.

De Beers Consolidated Mines has prospecting licences for gold and other minerals on these tenements.

It has approached a number of companies to partner it in the search for economically viable gold deposits and AngloGold was the only one to respond favourably to an opportunity that could result in low-cost mining that would be vastly safer than mining at depths of up to 4km below ground.

“We have a process in place to retain the South African Sea Areas diamond mining licences because the opportunity of co-commodity mining in the future is still there,” Mr Barton said.

“If we find viable gold deposits, even if they are marginal — diamond mining is very marginal — but the opportunity is there that mining co-commodity gold and diamonds may be quite a profitable business,” he said.
Courtesy: seccombea@bdfm.co.za

Tags: AngloGold, De Beers, Gold, Gold mining, Gold mining companies, Gold mining industry

Posted by admin on Dec 20 2011. Filed under Gold mining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry