The Kennady Diamonds exploration camp, Northwest Territories. Source: Kennady Diamonds Inc.
Winter infrastructure is now in place and two core rigs are fully operational with a total of 990 metres of drilling completed to date. Included in these results are two geotechnical holes and three exploration/delineation holes completed on the Faraday 1-3 kimberlite, with all five holes intersecting kimberlite.
In spite of severe storms and extremely cold temperatures, our winter program is proceeding smoothly," said Kennady President and CEO Dr. Rory Moore.
"Good progress has been made on the geotechnical drilling on Faraday 1-3 as we work towards collecting the required data to complete a prefeasibility level geotechnical study for use in future open pit design work," he said.
"The kimberlite intercepts in a number of drill holes completed to date have also been better than anticipated and will be accretive to kimberlite tonnage potential when the geological model for Faraday 1-3 is updated."
Kennady is focused on expanding its high-grade diamond resource along the Kelvin-Faraday kimberlite corridor as well as identifying new kimbelites outside the corridor.
To date, an indicated resource of 13.62 million carats of diamonds contained in 8.50 million tonnes of kimberlite, with a grade of 1.60 carats/tonne and an average value of US $63/carat, has been defined for the Kelvin kimberlite and an inferred resource of 5.02 million carats contained in 3.27 million tonnes of kimberlite with a grade of 1.54 carats/tonne and an average grade of US $98/carat, has been defined for the Faraday kimberlites, using a one-millimetre diamond bottom cut-off size.
The company said approximately 10,500 metres of diamond drilling are planned for the 2018 winter program, with 40% assigned to delineation and geotechnical drilling of the Faraday bodies and 60% dedicated to testing high priority grassroots exploration targets within the Kelvin-Faraday corridor.
Exploration drilling on the high-priority targets will commence when drilling on the Faraday 1-3 kimberlite is completed.
Kennady Diamonds recently agreed to be acquired by Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. [MPVD-TSX, NYSE] by way of a court-approved plan of arrangement.
Mountain Province CEO David Whittle said the Kennady assets are a strong complement to Mountain Province's interest in the Gahcho Kue project.
The Gahcho Kue diamond mine is a joint venture between De Beers Canada Inc. (51%) and Mountain Province (49%).
It is a fly-in-fly out operation located 280 km northeast of Yellowknife, N.W.T. It is the De Beers third diamond mine in Canada. The others are the Snap Lake mine and the Victor Mine.
The ramp up to production began in early August, 2016.
Located at Kennady Lake, Gahcho Kue is an open pit operation that aims to mine three kimberlites in sequence. Average annual production is targeted at 4.5 million carats annually.