The weaseling is anticlimactic: Mr. Mason, chairman, Mr. MacNeill, president and chief executive officer, and George Read, former vice-president and now Star's technical adviser, rightfully sniff that the Fort a la Corne kimberlites "have already been subject to extensive evaluation," including work by De Beers Canada when it ran the project in the 1990s and early 2000s, and then by Star Diamond when it took a new look, including a large test of Orion North several years later.
That large-diameter drill test saw Star Diamond recover 100 carats from 3,400 tonnes of kimberlite, and while it is not clear if that was the theoretical excavated tonnage or the amount of retained kimberlite processed, either way the result was discouraging, at 2.9 carats per hundred tonnes. In all, bulk sampling over the past quarter century produced 467 carats from 10,176 tonnes of extracted kimberlite -- about 4.6 carats per hundred tonnes and less than half of what either Orion South or Star has produced.
Star Diamond listed a target for further exploration at Orion North, with between 511 million and 609 million tonnes holding anywhere between 25.5 million and 50.5 million carats, therefore grading somewhere between an uneconomic 4.6 carats per hundred tonnes and a more intriguing nine carats per hundred tonnes -- a range supporting RTEC's assessment -- but divined by Star using hard sampling data and just a mere fraction of RTEC's geochemical handwaving.
