Mining’s old guard needs strong medicine
A new report details subpar investor returns in the mining industry over the last decade, particularly big cap diversified companies which have not adapted to new realities.
In late March, Vancouver-based North Arrow Minerals (TSXV:NAR) reported additional diamond results from Q1-4 kimberlite Naujaat Diamond Project, located 9 kilometres north of Naujaat in Nunavut’s Melville Peninsula.
“The samples were composited from drill core in the field based on observed lithological units and submitted for processing using a combined dense media separation / caustic fusion process intended to recover diamonds greater than 0.425mm. The largest diamond was recovered from unit A28 and weighs 0.25 carats,” the company said in a media statement.
This weekend and talking to the CBC, President and CEO Kenneth Armstrong said that since the site’s mineral resource is estimated around the lines of 30 to 50 carats of diamonds per 100 tonnes of kimberlite, he does not expect large recoveries in terms of quantity and so as he would like the focus to be on finding high-value orange-yellow rocks.
“It’s a really unique colour and it’s the main thing that’s keeping us interested in evaluating this project, if there’s enough of those yellow diamonds and enough of them have the kind of quality of the ones that we had polished, they could really make this deposit work,” he told the public broadcaster.
North Arrow is still waiting for final results from last year’s sampling program. If promising, the miner plans to hunt for up to $20 million in funding with the idea of collecting 2,000 carats in additional samples.
Comments
Don Duncan
Please stop referring to diamonds as ‘rocks’. Diamonds may be referred to as ‘stones’ – as in ‘carats per stone’ – but that’s all.