Mining and Exploration

West Africa-focused Stellar Diamonds has reported “encouraging” initial diamond recoveries from drill core samples of the company's Droujba kimberlite pipe in south-east Guinea.

The company recovered 538 diamonds from 291.62kg of kimberlite, including five commercial-sized diamonds larger than 0.85mm.

The majority of the diamonds recovered are classified as white, colourless and transparent.

Steve Timms, managing director of HGS Ghana Ltd, talks to Jayne Alverca about what it means to protect and enhance mining and industrial assets.

Angola has officially announced the selection of Statoil as an operator and partner in several offshore pre-salt blocks.

Angola’s national oil company Sonangol organised a restricted public bid round for access to pre-salt acreage in the Kwanza Basin in Angola. Pre-salt blocks are blocks where the main prospective interval was deposited prior to underwater salt accumulation millions of years ago.

Permission has been granted for construction of the final nine kilometres of the Corrib Gas Pipeline in Ireland.

The final stretch of the pipeline will bring gas onshore from the Corrib Gas Field, located 83 kilometres off Ireland’s north-west coast. The onshore section of pipeline will be underground along its entire route, linking the end of the offshore pipeline at Glengad to the gas terminal at Bellanaboy, County Mayo.

Permission was granted by Ireland’s planning board, An Bord Pleanála.

Petra Diamonds has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the Finsch diamond mine in South Africa from De Beers.

Finsch is one of the world’s major diamond mines and South Africa’s second largest diamond mine by production. Petra said its acquisition marked a continuation of the company’s strategy to build a world-class diamond mining group.

Finsch will become Petra’s second major mine producing over one million carats per annum (mctpa), and will become its eighth producing diamond mine.

Algeria’s state-run energy company, Sonatrach, plans to invest around $60 billion in boosting the country’s hydrocarbon production, according to the news agency APS.

The money will be invested over the next five years, APS said, citing the country’s energy minister Youcef Yousfi.

Around 57 per cent of the allocated funding will be spent on exploration and production activities, designed to increase the country's reserves and optimize its exploitation of its hydrocarbon deposits.

Caterpillar Inc. announced today that it plans to open a new manufacturing facility in Thailand to build underground mining machinery.

The company will break ground on the new factory in early 2011, with production scheduled to begin in late 2012. The facility will produce a full range of underground mining articulated trucks and loaders, which are used by Caterpillar customers around the world in hard-rock underground mining applications.

Anglo-Swiss mining giant Xstrata is said to be close to acquiring Drummond, Colombia’s second biggest coal miner, according to a report in UK newspaper the Sunday Times.

It is thought that family-owned Drummond could be sold for around $8 billion (£5 billion). The company was put up for sale last year.

A number of other mining giants, including Rio Tinto, Vale, Vedanta Resources and Essar Energy, are thought to also have been interested in Drummond.

Energy Fuels Inc. has been granted approval by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment for a radioactive materials license for the 500 ton per day Piñon Ridge Mill facility to be constructed twelve miles west of Naturita, Colorado in western Montrose County.

Royal Dutch Shell is to begin drilling an exploration well off the New Zealand coast that could extend the life of the Maui gas field.

Drilling ship the Noble Discoverer will drill the Ruru well for Shell Todd Oil Services Ltd. Shell Todd is 50 per cent owned by Todd Energy Ltd. and 50 per cent owned by The Hague-based Shell.

The Ruru well lies approximately 40 kilometres off the Taranki coast on New Zealand’s North Island and is adjacent to the Maui gas field. Maui, which covers an area of 157 square kilometres, began production 30 years ago.