De Beers to maine gold off SA west coast

| Friday December 3, 2010 00:00

They are to use years of hard-won experience by the diamond producer in extracting diamonds from the sea.

De Beers Consolidated Mines, chaired by Barend Petersen and which is the South African division of the global diamond giant, De Beers, holds prospecting licences to search for metals off the west coast in water from 20m to 200m deep, the limit at which its underwater diamond mining technology functions.

De Beers Marine operates a fleet of ships to explore for and mine diamonds in the sea around the Orange River mouth.A joint venture set up by De Beers and AngloGold is overseeing a project exploring for gold off the New Zealand coast, where it is believed glaciers scraping down mountains and into the sea deposited gold along the coast.

In the South African west coast model, gold is thought to have washed into the sea from rivers millions of years ago , and the deposits covered in sediment.

New Zealand-registered Seafield Resources, part of E Oppenheimer & Son International, has been exploring the coast off South Island. E Oppenheimer & Son owns 40% of De Beers.

The De Beers and AngloGold venture signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Seafield in February to provide 5,9m in funding towards exploration work to earn a stake of Seafield.

Seafield director Grant Stubbs said the results were below expectation. 'The prospecting campaign verified our geological model, and the data we have gathered will contribute to the present understanding of the offshore geology, but the gravity-recovered gold grades in the area sampled were disappointing,' Stubbs said on Monday.

Off the Cape west coast work had started with geophysical surveys over the prospecting tenements to identify drilling targets, said Tony Guthrie, group manager at De Beers.

Drilling would start in the first quarter of next year. 'We are finding gold. We just need to find economic amounts of it, just like any other mining venture,' Guthrie said. 'We don't know if there will be, but we would have pulled the plug if we didn't think anything was there.'

AngloGold agreed to provide 40m in funding in the three-year agreement that ends in 2012. De Beers is providing its evolving technology and experience . AngloGold was the only company to respond positively out of several approached by De Beers to explore for marine gold.

Developments in marine mining technology have made it economically feasible to search for and extract gold, and AngloGold had the will to become involved.

The risk to workers is low, unlike deeper, more dangerous and expensive mainland mines. The gold is easier to extract and the workforce small. De Beers' ships have staffs of about 40.