De Beers: Canadian Mine Now Commercial

Gahcho Kué in Canada is where De Beers is involved in a joint venue to construct that country’s first new diamond mine in more than eight years.

- David McKay

About 280km northeast of Yellowknife, the largest town of Canada’s Northwest Territories (NWT), is Gahcho Kué – a Chipewyan name for “place of the big rabbit” – although caribou are also native to the region. So are diamonds.

It’s here, above the tree line and only 400km south of the Arctic Circle, that De Beers, in a joint venture with Mountain Province Mining, sank C$1bn (R9.5bn) into building Canada’s first new diamond mine for about eight years.

It’s a hostile environment and underlines the difficulty of finding fresh sources of diamonds. The often-quoted data still has the power to amaze: of some 7 000 kimberlite pipes that have been sampled through time, only 60 have contained enough diamonds to justify a mine – about 1% of the total.