from will purcell The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Friday was a pleasing 53-34-148. The TSX Venture Exchange gained four points to 530 while polished diamond prices jumped 0.5 per cent. Patrick Evans's Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. (MPV) lost six cents to $4.90 on 98,000 shares. The company and De Beers Canada are on schedule and within budget with their billion-dollar Gahcho Kue diamond mine in the Northwest Territories. The stock is also doing well of late: a share cost just $3.40 in December. Don Bubar's Avalon Rare Metals Inc. (AVL) closed unchanged at 11.5 cents on 427,000 shares. The company says its big Nechalacho rare earth project will "remain inactive" this year while it focuses on lithium and tin.
Patrick Evans's Kennady Diamonds Inc. (KDI) lost 20 cents to $2.80 on 13,000 shares. The company has more diamond counts from its Kennady North project, 10 kilometres northeast of Gahcho Kue in the Northwest Territories, this time from the Faraday 1 kimberlite. The company recovered 46 diamonds larger than a 0.85-millimetre cut-off from 518 kilograms of kimberlite. The gems weighed a total of 2.41 carats, implying a grade of 4.65 carats per tonne. These "2015 diamond recovery results" presumably include the diamond counts revealed late in January, when 225 kilograms of Faraday 1 kimberlite yielded 22 diamonds larger than the 0.85-millimetre cut-off. Those gems weighed 0.69 carat for a grade of 3.07 carats per tonne.
Kennady does not explicitly say those counts were included in the latest result, but it said earlier last year that it had just 550 kilograms of Faraday 1 kimberlite core. The second-largest diamond recovered in the first batch, a 0.12-carat off-white, transparent tetra hexahedron with no inclusions, may have been the 0.12-carat off-white, transparent tetra hexahedron with minor inclusions described as the third-largest gem recovered in the latest counts. (If so, a closer look revealed some slight inclusions.) Either way, it was no match for a 1.43-carat off-white, transparent octahedral diamond with no inclusions recovered in the latest Faraday 1 test. That find seems a stroke of luck since the diamond ranking second weighed just 0.17 carat, but it has promotable qualities -- at least other than its not-so-fancy yellowish hue.
Kennady has drilled six new holes at Faraday 1, which the company initially thought was a kimberlite sheet. It now believes it is a pipe, as drilling this year has produced one intersection topping 60 metres in one hole and three others that top 20 metres. Kennady Diamonds has already drilled Faraday 1 over a strike length of 160 metres and Mr. Evans, chief executive officer, says the company's drillers are now drilling 40 metres farther northwest for the next series of holes, which he hopes will yield further encouragement.
From an initial target of five million tonnes three years ago, Kennady now has a tonnage target of between 13 million and 16 million tonnes at Kennady North, most of it in the heavily explored Kelvin pipe, where drill intersections of about 200 metres have been produced. The latest work at Faraday 1 and Faraday 2 could see a further expansion of the tonnage target and Mr. Evans says his company will soon have a resource estimate for the project. Mr. Evans says the maiden resource estimate could be available by next week, and he rarely promises what he cannot deliver.