"Significant Step" for De Beers
August 14, 25
The discovery of a new kimberlite field in Angola could hardly have come at a better time for De Beers.
The last-minute addition of a promising new asset can only increase its value, as potential buyers close in.
Anglo American is in the process of selling De Beers, the company that shaped the modern diamond industry, but which is now a loss-maker, so that it can focus on copper and other more profitable assets.
It's impossible to assess at this stage what value the kimberlite field might add. We don't yet have any details on reserves, grades, how accessible and therefore how costly it will be to mine the site.
The announcement made jointly on Tuesday by De Beers and its partner Endiama, Angola's national diamond company, simply said that it was "a significant step forward in their joint exploration efforts with the discovery of kimberlite, the host rock for diamonds".
De Beers will now carry out further drilling and ground geophysical surveys in the coming months, and says laboratory analysis will be conducted to confirm the kimberlite type and assess its diamond potential.
Mother Nature hides her diamonds very carefully, as De Beers knows only too well. It's spent $1bn in the last two decades exploring for diamonds, without success.
It's not hard to understand how that happened. There are an estimated 6,500 kimberlite pipes globally, of which around 900 contain diamonds, brought close to the Earth's surface by volcanic activity deep in the mantle.
No more than 60 of those kimberlite pipes have economic diamond concentrations that are sufficient to support mining operations, and of those, only around seven are considered tier-1 deposits - world-class mines that will have a lifetime revenue of $20bn-plus.
But De Beers' efforts have finally paid off after more than three fruitless decades of exploring for diamonds.
"While De Beers Group has continued to find kimberlites in existing fields and brownfield sites in many countries across the world over the past few decades, the last time the De Beers Group found a new kimberlite field in a totally greenfield area was in the late 1980s in Canada," a spokesman for the company told us earlier today.
"We will now need to carry out the analysis to understand whether the discovery has the potential to be turned into an operating mine; and if so we would then need to undertake a large package of work to develop the project plan."
De Beers returned to Angola - a country that has yet to explore 60 per cent of its diamond-rich territories - in 2022. It had been exploring there from 2005 to 2012, but with limited success.
Soon after it returned, in November 2024, it said it had identified eight new high-potential kimberlite sites in Lunda Sul, the northeastern province that is home to the huge Catoca mine.
And this week it confirmed it had found a kimberlite field, which usually means a cluster of several kimberlite pipes and related kimberlite intrusions.
Al Cook, CEO of De Beers Group, said: "Angola is, in our view, one of the best places on the planet to look for diamonds, and this discovery reinforces our confidence."
Recent history supports this. In November 2013, Catoca Mining Society (also known as Sociedade Mineira de Catoca) discovered the kimberlite deposit that became Luele, a newly-opened mine with estimated resource of 628m carats and a projected operational lifespan of 60 years.
Have a fabulous wekend.