De Beers said the diamond industry’s exploration budget is set to remain high as the chase to find the next major source of gems intensifies.
The diamond mining industry had spent almost $7 billion on exploration since 2000.
It said in its inaugural diamond insight report that most of the exploration spend was taking place in historically underexplored African countries such as Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zimbabwe, as well as the vast swathes of Arctic Siberia and Canada.
It was, however, quick to caution that large-scale profitable discoveries would most likely remain elusive.
“Viable diamond deposits of any scale are rare and difficult to find, and no amount of investment in exploration guarantees the discovery of deposits on which sustainable mining operations can be built,” said De Beers.
“In reality, exploration spend has not kept pace with that for other natural resources; it is now at practically half the record levels seen in 2007, when the industry was spending almost $1 billion per year on diamond exploration.”
Exploration efforts had to date yielded relatively meagre results, said De Beers.
“Only one diamond deposit of significant size (Bunder, in India) has been discovered during this period, in addition to other smaller deposits such as Orapa AK6 in Botswana (now the Karowe mine), owned by Lucara Diamond Corporation,” said the group.
De Beers and Alrosa represented almost 75 per cent of exploration spending in 2013.
It said while the appetite for exploration remained high, overall spending had still not reached the record levels of 2007, when companies spent almost $1 billion on diamond exploration.
“The large diamond mining companies are expected to continue to invest in exploration, but the probability of a major profitable new diamond discovery will remain relatively low,” it said.
“This is simply because finding economic diamond deposits is difficult: even spending billions of US dollars in exploration carries no guarantee of actually discovering economically viable deposits.”
Over the last 140 years, almost 7,000 kimberlite pipes have been sampled by geologists, about 1,000 of which have been diamondiferous.
However, only about 60 of these are sufficiently rich in diamond to be economically viable.
Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished
