Renard flashes with brilliance

摘要

One of the most pleasant surprises of the eleventh trading week came out of Canada's beleaguered junior diamond subsector, as equal joint-venture partners Stornoway Diamond and Soquem transformed their Renard diamond project in Quebec's Otish Mountains from a geological curiosity into a potential mine with a substantial resource base and robust preliminary economics. Stornoway unveiled a dramatically improved preliminary assessment of the Renard project that is built upon the partners' gutsy and wildly successful 8-million dollars drilling campaign in 2009 that was carried out at the depth of the recession-induced collapse in diamond prices. (Rough diamond prices have since recovered sharply owing to renewed global economic growth and deep production cuts by the diamond majors.)