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Kimberlite sample yields 8.4 carats per tonne Kennady Diamonds plans to accelerate bulk sample drilling after promising find
Daron Letts
Northern News Services
Published Monday, August 12, 2013
KENNADY LAKE
Kennady Diamonds Inc. president and CEO Patrick Evans is heralding the latest drill core sample taken from the Kelvin and Faraday kimberlite cluster as "extraordinary" after recovering 8.44 carats per tonne. The 1.1-tonne sample, extracted from the site 280 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife last winter, is part of a 5,000-metre drill program undertaken by the company to determine the size and shape of the kimberlites.
"Although it's a small data set, no company has ever recovered grades of 8.4 carats a tonne from exploration of a kimberlite," Evans said. "The highest before was probably somewhere around four-and-a-half carats a tonne."
The largest three diamonds recovered from the sample are a 2.48 carat off-white transparent octahedral, a .90 carat off-white transparent irregular, and a 0.75 carat off-white transparent octahedral, with approximately 64 per cent of the recovered diamonds classified as white and transparent. About three per cent of the diamonds are classified as yellow and transparent. Only seven micro diamonds out of 8,708 are described as brown or grey, which Evans said bodes well for the eventual valuation.
"We've decided to move pretty quickly to the next step, which is to take a bulk sample," Evans said. "We'll probably want to take a bulk sample of 30 to 50 tonnes from Kelvin. What that will do for us is give us sufficient diamond data to be able to more accurately model what the grade of the kimberlite is and what the diamond value is."
Options for taking the bulk sample include drilling a large hole to remove the 30 to 50 tonnes or using a large-diameter drill to extract the kimberlite, or a combination of both methods. The company is currently determining which option would be most cost-effective and what the timeline might be.
"It will be driven by technical considerations, but more importantly by the cost considerations," Evans said. "We will have to do further financing. We've got about $2
million in treasury and we will have to probably raise in the order of $5-to-$10 million."
The company hopes to define a minimum of five-million tonnes of kimberlite, Evans said.
"We're hopeful that by the time we're finished the summer program by the end of the month, that we'll have enough data to be able to determine at least the size and shape of the Kelvin kimberlite and that will enable us to declare an initial inferred resource," Evans said, adding the summer program will likely yield a two-tonne core sample. "We know we have diamond-bearing kimberlites and we have a pretty good idea of the quality of the diamonds. But we don't yet have sufficient data to support a resource statement."
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