Brazilian Diamonds finds Brazilian hope
2005-02-02 15:19 ET - Street Wire
by Will Purcell
Kenneth Judge and Stephen Fabian's Brazilian Diamonds Ltd. has some intriguing diamond counts from its Tucano-1 kimberlite in Brazil. The company has several gem prospects in the country, including the Canastra-1 pipe that produced an intriguing diamond grade and value when De Beers worked the project several years earlier. Canastra and Santo Antonio do Bonito are still priorities for the company, but the Tucano result offers hope for the new project as well.
The Tucano counts
Brazilian Diamonds drilled its first Tucano target late last year, intersecting weathered kimberlite just below the surface. The company sent about 67 kilograms of rock back to Canada for microdiamond recovery, and the material delivered 182 microdiamonds. That worked out to about 2,700 stones per tonne.
That is often enough to attract the market's notice, although it usually takes toutable numbers of larger diamonds to truly wow speculators. The Tucano-1 body did not appear to have a favourable diamond size distribution, but investors were in a buying mood nevertheless, as the company's shares jumped 14 cents on the news, hitting an intraday high of 64 cents.
Most of the Tucano diamonds were tiny, falling through a 0.106-millimetre screen, which is the minimum cut-off used by many explorers. Only 76 stones were large enough to sit on that sieve and just one of the diamonds clung to a 0.30-millimetre mesh. That proportion works out to about 1.3 per cent, which is at least an order of magnitude smaller than what many intriguing Canadian deposits delivered over the past few years.
Another clear sign of the modest size distribution at Tucano-1 is the weight of the microdiamond parcel. The 182 stones weighed a cumulative 0.00287 carat, which suggests a microdiamond grade of about 0.04 carat per tonne. Based on the rapid decline in diamond counts in the larger sieve sizes and the modest weight, the prospects at Tucano-1 seem dim.
The encouragement
