De Beers CEO: 'Peak Diamonds’ is 3 Years Away

One of the barons of the global diamond industry has prophesized that the peak of planetary diamond extraction will occur in just three years' time, Mining.com reports cited by Israelidiamond.co.il. In an interview with the German press, De Beers chief executive officer Philippe Mellier said that so-called 'peak diamonds' – the point at which 50% of all the naturally occurring diamonds in the world have already been extracted – will be surpassed in 2017.
The concept of 'peak' has been used in recent years mostly to describe the end of the age of oil, the resource that more than any other fuels industrial civilization. After being popularized by the 2004 documentary film 'The End of Suburbia', it began to enter the common discourse, first for oil and then for other vital commodities that are rapidly depleting, such as clean drinking water.
According to peak theory, the extraction of all resources that are non-renewable on the scale of human lifespans follows a bell curve: little is extracted at first, but then as technologies are developed to extract with more efficiently, the extraction rate increases rapidly. At a certain point, the easy-to-extract stuff begins to run out, leaving behind the harder-and-more-expensive-to-extract stuff. At a certain point, extraction rate levels off, and this is called peak. Afterwards, the extraction rate inexorably declines.