Diamond Fields International Ltd.’s joint venture partner, Manafa International Trade Company of Saudi Arabia, has been granted an exclusive mining licence for a period of 30 years, extending over the Atlantis II Deeps, one of the largest hydrothermal polymetallic deposits in the world, located within the Red Sea.
Pursuant to the terms of the joint venture agreement with Manafa, DFI owns 50.1 per cent of the venture and Manafa owns 49.9 per cent. The project will be developed in defined stages, commencing with a scoping study to start immediately and designed to test the accuracy of the huge volume of historical data available on the deposit.
The Atlantis II Deeps has a surface area of 60 square kilometres (23 square miles) and contains an extensive volume of metal-enriched mud, the consistency of soft toothpaste. Extensive historical work has been conducted on the project, with a total of 628 cores having been taken, with a total length of approximately four kilometres. The bulk of the cores are in an excellent state of preservation, which will enable Diamond Fields to produce a preliminary NI 43-101-compliant resource statement for the deposit. Historical exploration work undertaken by the former Preussag AG culminated in a program to demonstrate the technical viability of mining the deposit and processing it through to the production of metals. This was accomplished through a maritime test pilot mining operation conducted over a four-month period from March to June, 1979, and resulting in the production of metals using hydrometallurgy. This work demonstrated that the metal-rich sediments could be successfully raised from the sea floor and processed. More than $70-million (U.S.) (in 1970s dollars) has been spent to date in research work conducted on the deposit and funded by the government of Saudi Arabia.
The latest historical resource estimates (not NI 43-101 compliant) of Atlantis II Deeps suggest tremendous economic potential with approximately 1.83 million tonnes of zinc, 402,000 tonnes of copper and 3,432 tonnes of silver contained within 89.5 million tonnes of ore (dry, salt free).
Diamond Fields has reached agreement with David Heydon, former chief executive officer of Nautilus Minerals Inc., to spearhead development of this project (see DFI news in Stockwatch on March 24, 2010).
Commenting on this significant project, Wayne Malouf, DFI’s chief executive officer, said, “Diamond Fields is pleased to be teaming with Manafa to develop this exceptional project and excited at the opportunity to bring DFI’s specialist marine mining expertise to bear on this world-class deposit.”
The geological and technical information in this press release has been compiled and reviewed by I. Ransome, BSc (honours) geology, UBO, PriSciNat. Mr. Ransome is the chief geologist for Diamond Fields, and is a registered geological scientist with the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions and is thus a qualified person under NI 43-101 of the Canadian securities administrators.
