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Diamond & Specialty Minerals Summary for May 30, 2024
2024-05-30 15:34 ET - Market Summary
by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Thursday was a positive 91-82-137 as the TSX Venture Exchange added five points to 614. Spring has sprung across the southern Northwest Territories, and exploration crews are expected to hit the field across the Kennady Lake project, 250 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife, being advanced at a snail's pace by Dermot Desmond and Mark Wall's Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. (MPVD).
Mountain Province, down one-half cent to 18.5 cents on 12,000 shares today, had planned till sampling across the Kennady claims last year, focusing on four areas identified from earlier work. Unfortunately, all available aircraft in the region surrounding Yellowknife had been commandeered by the government to support the battle against wildfires plaguing much of the Northwest Territories -- fires that forced the evacuation of Yellowknife for a time.
And so, Mr. Wall, president and chief executive officer, is hoping for a wetter summer this year so that his crews of till samplers can get to work, tracking the diamond indicator mineral anomalies to likely bedrock sources. This year there will be an added twist, as the samplers will be testing other targets as well, after sampling in 2021 and 2022 returned gold grains in five other areas.
The diamond hunters will focus on four areas, dubbed Bob, P29, P27 and Southwest. The Southwest area, centred about 20 kilometres west-southwest of the company's 49-per-cent-owned Gahcho Kue diamond mine, has produced the highest indicator counts. The counts at Bob, 12 kilometres west-southwest of the mine, are lower, but are in an area that could host the sources of some of the Southwest grains.
The P29 area lies near the northern boundary of the Kennady North property, 10 kilometres north of Gahcho Kue and a few kilometres west of the Kelvin and Faraday kimberlites, host to the current optimism for the property. The final area, P27, is about 10 kilometres northwest of the Gahcho Kue mine and a few kilometres from the northern edge of the property.
Mountain Province is chasing more kimberlite like what turned up two decades earlier on Kennady North -- rock that has been sitting as a resource for the past decade. At Kelvin, the company has 8.5 million tonnes indicated at 1.6 carats per tonne, about 13.6 million carats. At Faraday 2, it lists 2.07 million tonnes inferred at 2.63 carats per tonne, good for 5.45 million carats, while at Faraday 1-3, 1.87 million tonnes inferred at 1.04 carats per tonne provide 1.9 million carats more.
In all, the three Kennady North pipes host nearly 21 million carats at grades roughly matching what the company and its majority co-venturer, De Beers Canada, have been mining at Gahcho Kue for the past seven years. The diamond values at the Kennady North bodies are also in line with what the mine has been averaging, so while there are not enough carats to support a standalone operation, Mountain Province hopes to include the Kennady North kimberlite in an extended mine plan for Gahcho Kue.
There is a complication, however, as De Beers owns 51 per cent of the mine but nothing at Kennady North. And so, advancement of Kennady North proceeds at a snail's pace -- one laid down by an arthritic snail at that -- as the two sides have yet to come to terms regarding the Kennady kimberlite. That may change in the years ahead, if the Kennady rock is deemed economic as there are a few years worth of feed present, and pushing the closure date farther into the future would be good for both De Beers and Mountain Province. And so, stay tuned, but remain patient.