Mining Diamonds in Botswana increase in discovery
Mining Diamonds in Botswana increase in discovery
Recently Canadian junior miner Pangolin Diamonds released a statement saying that the company found one of the world’s biggest kimberlite formations in southern Botswana’s Tsabong North prospecting area. Not long after that kimberlites discovery the mining company found yet another massive kimberlite formation in its Malatswae exploration area in the south.
Mining diamonds in Botswana is not an easy job; did you know that only about one in 200 kimberlites contains sufficient diamonds to be mined? Botswana remains essentially a frontier province for all kinds of exploration. Junior miners play a vital role in the country’s mining development and such miners normally find deposits, but rarely exploit them. The negative aspect for Botswana is that the juniors can run out of money and are then unable to maintain exploration and therefore don’t reach the point at which it might be marketed. For this reason, the juniors begin to mine the stock market long before they ever mine a tonne of ore. The reason is that unless they are able to provide sufficient good news they cannot attract risk capital and their exploration comes to an abrupt end. Pangolin has been very successful in mining the Toronto Stock Exchange and its shares have doubled in value in the half year.
Botswana has had the good fortune to be blessed with two of the richest diamond mines ever found. Diamonds are incredibly rare despite 35 years elapsing since the discovery of Jwaneng, the world’s richest mine, no one in Botswana or anywhere else has managed to discover anything that size.
The future of Botswana rests in using the abundant resources it knows it has to develop a sophisticated mining and processing sector, but this will require difficult and expensive infrastructure and policies that will be hard to implement.
