Marine diamond miner
“The third quarter is the first production period in which Namco has enjoyed the benefit of having both the NamSSol and Nam2 mining tools in operation,” states Chief Executive Officer Greg Walker. “While work needs to be done to further improve the efficiency of the crawlers, the quarter’s results demonstrate what can be achieved with this mining technology, which is unique to Namco.”
The bulk of the recent output came from Features 21 and 22, which are in the Hottentot Bay grant, off the Namibian coast. In late July, the Nam2 crawler mined 16,714 carats from 1.9 sq. km of the latter feature to set a new 1-day production record. The old record was set in early 1999, when the NamSSol crawler recovered 16,271 carats from Feature 19, which lies to the south, in Luderitz Bay.
Namco entered the current quarter with 205,686 carats of production under its belt.
On the exploration front, the MV Zacharias continues to test areas near Features 21 and 22. During the third quarter, the vessel extracted 481 samples and delineated three new mining blocks to push probable reserves in licence ML103A to 210,000 carats. Of that amount, 133,720 carats had been mined by the quarter’s end.
Combined, Namco’s offshore properties now contain 392,000 carats of probable reserves, at a grade of 0.37 carat per sq. metre. This is just 12,000 carats shy of an estimate made in March, despite the mining of 163,440 carats since then.
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