Sea Platforms to Exploit African West Coast Marine Diamond Concessions

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources Houston, Texas). A South African company, Gilboa Properties, is planning to build 30 Seawalker self-contained jack-up walking marine diamond mining platforms for use on mining concessions on South Africa's West Coast. Gilboa has signed a joint venture agreement with Seacore, a UK based specialist marine engineering group to manufacture the platforms at an estimated cost of $2 million each giving an initial project total of $60 million manufacturing production. The platforms will be built in South Africa using local materials.

The Seawalker will solve the problem of access to the West Coast marine concessions because all the land concessions up to the seafront from Alexandra Bay in the north to Saldanha Bay in the south belong to the mining houses Alexkor, De Beers, and Transhex.

Transhex, which signed a joint venture deal with Seacore in April 2000 that gave Transhex exclusivity on the Seawalker for all concessions on the West Coast, has now agreed to waive the exclusivity and Seacore is working on a deal with Alexkor to mine that company's shallow water concessions.

Marine geologists estimate that the West Coast of Africa still holds 3 billion carats of gem quality diamonds. The world's natural mining production was 110 million carats of which 10.5 million carats were produced by South Africa. The 30 Seawalker platforms will together have the capacity to mine 1 million carats of marine diamonds annually.

Seacore Mining is currently in negotiations with other shallow and mid-water concession holders on the South African West Coast, Namibia and Angola to mine their concessions with Seawalker platforms and technology.