Stornoway Diamond Corporation has said its estimate of the Probable Mineral Reserves for the Renard Diamond Project has increased by 25% and the Mineral Reserve based mine life has gone up from 11 years to 14 years in a statement released yesterday.

The miner now estimates Probable Mineral Reserves of from 22.3 million carats as against the earlier estimate of 17.9 mn cts (representing 33.4 million tonnes at an average grade of 67 carats per hundred tonnes). It said that the first ore processing forecast is expected by September 2016 and the first commercial production from the mine by Ddecember 2016, a five month improvement on the earlier schedule.

Stornoway also said that the average diamond production in years 1 to 10 is now likely to be 1.8 million carats per year compared to 1.6 million carats per year previously, with schedules of 1.9 million carats produced and 1.4 million carats sold to the end of 2017, increases of 24% and 57% respectively compared to the previous plan.

It also expects a scheduled increase in processing rate from 2.2 million tonnes per annum (6,000 tonnes per day) to 2.5 million tonnes per annum (7,000 tonnes per day) starting in 2018.

Matt Manson, President and CEO of Stornoway, commented “We are updating the project’s mine plan to incorporate updates to the Mineral Resources completed in 2013 and 2015, and to capture opportunities that have developed in schedule, operating profile and processing capacity. The new plan shows incremental improvements in the project’s cost to complete, average carat production, mine life and Mineral Reserves. All-important early carat production to the end of 2017 shows a substantial increase compared to the previous estimate. We look forward to building on our track record to date of solid project execution as we bring Renard into production later this year.”