Burgundy Diamond Mines is expected to complete the $136m purchase of the Ekati mine, in Canada, by the end of this month and says it will advance plans for first-of-its-kind underwater crawler.
The Australia-based end-to-end diamond company expects to “significantly” extend the life of Ekati to 2029. It opened in 1998 as Canada’s first diamond mine.
Burgundy is buying Ekati from Arctic Canadian Diamond Company, which acquired it in February 2021 after the previous owners, Dominion Diamonds, filed for insolvency. The Arctic Diamond name will be retained.
Arctic acknowledged during its ownership of the mine that conventional mining methods would not prove economically viable in the long term and has been developing an underwater remote mining (URM) system.
It will be the first time such a system – flooding an existing pit with millions of cubic meters of water and then using an underwater mining crawler – has been used to recover diamonds.
Netherlands-based Royal IHC, suppliers of maritime technology, will build the URM system, drawing on its experience of systems currently used to lay underwater cables, mine other mineral commodities and retrieve marine diamonds.
The crawler has a drum at the bottom with teeth that allow it to mine 600 tonnes of ore an hour as it circles the bottom of the pit, layer by layer.
The ore is then pumped up as a slurry to the surface and goes to a de-watering plant. It is stockpiled then transported by road train to the process plant.
“The real advantage is it’s a tier-one asset in a tier-one country,” Kim Truter, Burgundy’s CEO, told CBC News, Canada’s publicly owned news and information service.
Burgundy is also reviving the Ellendale mine, Western Australia, once the world’s largest producer of fancy yellow diamonds, and has established its own dedicated cut and polish facility in Perth, also in Western Australia.
Pic of crawler courtesy Arctic Canadian Diamond Company.