Gahcho Kué in Canada is where De Beers is involved in a joint venue to construct that country’s first new diamond mine in more than eight years.
About 280km northeast of Yellowknife, the largest town of Canada’s Northwest Territories (NWT), is Gahcho Kué – a Chipewyan name for “place of the big rabbit” – although caribou are also native to the region. So are diamonds.
It’s here, above the tree line and only 400km south of the Arctic Circle, that De Beers, in a joint venture with Mountain Province Mining, sank C$1bn (R9.5bn) into building Canada’s first new diamond mine for about eight years.
It’s a hostile environment and underlines the difficulty of finding fresh sources of diamonds. The often-quoted data still has the power to amaze: of some 7 000 kimberlite pipes that have been sampled through time, only 60 have contained enough diamonds to justify a mine – about 1% of the total.
This story is from the 30 March 2017 edition of Finweek English.
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This story is from the 30 March 2017 edition of Finweek English.
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