JEREMY LOVELL, Cape Town | Tuesday
THE world’s biggest floating diamond processing vessel will set sail for the first time within three weeks and should be in position off Namibia before Christmas, the Namibian Minerals Corporation (NAMCO) said this week.
NAMCO chairman Alastair Holberton told reporters he expected the vessel would harvest 200000 carats of diamonds, worth about $30m, in its first year of operation.
Geologists estimate that up to three billion carats of diamonds lie off the Namibian and South African coasts.
NAMCO has four mining vessels, including the new vessel, MV Ya Toivo, to comb the sea bed.
Holberton said the latest project had cost NAMCO R200m.
MV Ya Toivo’s superstructure is in the final stages of being converted from a British navy nuclear submarine recovery vessel, formerly named HMS Challenger.
State of the art computers, global positioning satellite systems and high manoeuvrability allow the ship to be positioned over Namibia’s extensive subsea diamond beds. A 185-tonne underwater caterpillar-tracked vacuum will then be lowered to the seabed where it will begin to suck up the diamonds in clearly defined gravel beds.
The remote controlled crawler can descend to 250m and stay submerged for up to five weeks at a time while eating its way through 100 tonnes of material an hour, 24 hours a day.
The dredged material is sucked into the processing plant which separates the diamonds from the rest, dumps the mud and gravel back into the sea and grades the gemstones electronically.
Once graded into fine, medium and coarse, the diamonds are dropped into a safe which will be taken by helicopter back to Windhoek and then on to Antwerp for sale.
Holberton said NAMCO had so far assessed only 20% of its Namibian offshore concessions but had already firmly established the existence of one million carats of diamonds and was fairly confident of a further two million carats.
Namibia is the world’s number five diamond producer by value because most of the stones are of gem quality.
NAMCO, founded in 1992 by Holberton, is responsible for 30% of Namibian ocean production of diamonds.
The NASDAQ-listed company achieved earnings of $2.6m in the first nine months of 2000 and is sitting on a cash pile of $9m. – Reuters