Grizzly Awaits Gem Counts, Grades
2007-03-28
by Will Purcell
Brian Testo's Grizzly Diamonds Ltd. recovered more Legend kimberlite than first thought and it hopes to have a promotable parcel of diamonds in a month or two. The company spent several hundred thousand dollars drilling the big pipe, seeking richer phases of kimberlite. The drill program did encounter a new, prettier type of rock and that has Grizzly planning to drill some new targets later this year.
The plan
Grizzly originally thought it recovered about five tonnes of kimberlite from 13 drill holes, but the rock weighed just over 10 tonnes in all, thanks to a couple of extra holes. The rock apparently includes a few tonnes of the new kimberlite phase, which contains significantly larger and more abundant mantle nodules. The best diamond grades from most kimberlites typically come from coarse-grained material, giving Grizzly cause for optimism.
Mr. Testo said Grizzly shipped its Legend kimberlite to the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC) facility in Saskatoon for safekeeping while it worked out a deal with De Beers Canada Inc. The diamond giant has now agreed to crush and concentrate the kimberlite through its dense media separation facility, so the company will haul the rock back to Grande Prairie for processing.
Mr. Testo said the cost to truck and process the kimberlite would be just $20,000. Grizzly still has no firm date set for the work, but the company anticipates that De Beers will prepare the concentrate in mid-April. That would leave the SRC to perform caustic fusion on the heavier bits of material found in the kimberlite, some of which will hopefully be diamonds.
Grizzly had a second target on the Legend property that it wanted to drill this spring, but it was unable to get permission to drill the big feature, which lies under a camp run by an oil and gas company. Grizzly was eventually able to get permission about a week after it pulled its drill off the property for the spring.
Mr. Testo said Grizzly remains intrigued by the huge target, which lies just 500 metres from the Legend pipe, but the company would not make a return trip just to test the one feature. Nevertheless, he anticipates a new drill program late this year, regardless of the Legend diamond counts, as the company has several other anomalies on the big property worth testing.
The encouragement
Kennecott Canada Exploration Inc. drilled into a cluster of nine pipes on the Legend property in the late 1990s, but diamonds were rare. The best was Legend, which yielded a mere four microdiamonds from over 400 kilograms of kimberlite. Grizzly might do better, as the SRC uses a significantly smaller cut-off than Kennecott did, and current methods appear more efficient at recovering diamonds.
It would nevertheless be a surprise if Grizzly pawed up a brighter result out of the same rock, but the coarser-grained material does offer a glint of promotability. Mr. Testo thinks the large Legend kimberlites could be comparable with the huge pipes in the Fort a la Corne district of Saskatchewan, which yield markedly different diamond grades in the different rock units.
For instance, Shore Gold Inc. is finding portions of the big pipe have grades of about 0.20 carat per tonne, while other phases of kimberlite have a diamond content of about 0.02 carat per tonne. As a result, finding a richer zone at Legend does not seem far-fetched.
If Grizzly did manage to tap into a zone with more promotable diamond counts, the company will have to demonstrate it has enough of the richer rock to support the story. Fortunately, the core of the Legend pipe lies under just 20 metres of overburden, unlike the 100 metres of waste that covers Star.
Grizzly closed unchanged at $1.20 Tuesday on 12,000 shares.
