Diamonds & Specialty Minerals Summary for June 20, 2014Ken MacNeill and George Read's Shore Gold Inc. (SGF), down one-half cent to 21 cents on 77,000 shares, plans another round of drilling at its Star-Orion South diamond project in central Saskatchewan. The play cleared feasibility three years ago and an arduous six-year environmental assessment is finally wrapping up, but a Star-Orion South mine remains a remote possibility until Shore can raise $2-billion to cover its capital cost. Mr. Read, senior vice-president and Shore's eternal enthusiast, says the company's multimillion-dollar bulk sampling and large diameter drilling program, which ran continuously through the mid-2000s, was "curtailed by the world financial crisis" that hit in 2008. He now wants to resume that work on a limited scale. Shore plans 12 new large diameter holes on the periphery of Orion South to upgrade a significant inferred resource. Shore lists over 110 million tonnes of inferred kimberlite within Orion South at just over 0.10 carat per tonne, a total of 12 million carats. Mr. Read says the amount of the inferred resource that can be upgraded depends on the number of holes Shore can drill. If it completes the proposed 12 holes he believes the company can upgrade six million carats to indicated, which could then be added to the mine plan. Shore currently lists nearly 280 million tonnes of kimberlite at Star-Orion South as a mining reserve. That rock contains an estimated 34.4 million carats, assuming Mr. Read's unorthodox assumptions about earlier drilling results hold up. Mr. Read believes his big drills missed some diamonds and damaged others. As a result Shore inflated its actual diamond recoveries from drilling by a significant amount. He may be right, but Shore's potential backers seem leery of the risk.