Aim-listed diamond exploration company Pangea DiamondFields’ Cassanguidi project, in Angola, was expected to reach full-capacity commercial-scale operation by the third quarter of this year, as the expansion project was nearly completed.
The company, led by CEO Brett Thompson, on Friday reported that phases one and two of the project had been completed and fully commissioned by the end of June.
The first phase comprised the construction of a mobile primary concentration facility, called plant three, while the second phase involved the construction of a centralised recovery facility, including a dense-media separation (DMS) reconcentration plant and an X-ray recovery facility.
The third phase of the project, which entails the construction and commissioning of an additional primary concentration facility, known as plant two, would be fully commissioned by the end of July.
The DMS plant would receive concentrate from the existing plant one, as well as from the new plant two and plant three.
The processing facilities at the project had formerly only consisted of a single primary concentration facility, plant one, from which concentrate had been fed to a recovery unit, which used vibrating grease tables to recover diamonds.
However, a “significant amount of manual intervention” was needed to clean the grease from the tables, which represented a security risk, noted the exploration company.
The new processing facilities had the capacity to treat about 35 000 m3/m of gravel, producing about 7 500 ct/m.
Pangea would now focus on ramping up the mining activities at the Cassanguidi project to take full advantage of the expanded processing capacity, it stated.
The company highlighted that once the project reached full commercial capacity, it would allow the explorer to generate sufficient cash flow, at current diamond prices, to fund the operating costs of its other projects, as well as its central overhead costs.
It reported that rough diamond prices have been moving upwards recently, reaching between 65% and 70% of the mid-2008 prices. This was compared with the low of about 50% of mid-2008 price levels reached by the end of last year.
While this was promising, the company was continuing to monitor the prices and would wait for “signs of stability” in these upward movements before changing its strategy of focusing on the development of near-production assets and the conservation of cash.
In light of the global economic crisis, which had impacted on the demand for diamonds and selling prices, the company has delayed and suspended a number of its projects.
Meanwhile, pilot mining at Pangea’s Bakersville project, in South Africa, was continuing to produce good results, with the company expecting to finalise and submit a mining rights application for the project by the third quarter of the year.
Pangea was focusing on breaking even economically at the project, while also aiming to increase the resource volume and the confidence in the resource by upgrading some of the inferred resource into the indicated category, it stated.
A further resource update, incorporating indicated resources, would be completed after the next sale of diamonds from the project by the end of August.
The company had cash reserves of $3,1-million and a diamond stock worth about $0,5-million at the end of June.
