Lucapa regains some of lustre on diamond find; shares up 21pc

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend and Lucapa Diamond Company appears to have discovered the source of precious gems at its 80 per cent-owned Brooking project.

The news went some way to picking the company (ASX:LOM) up off the 52-week low of 20c it sunk to last week. Shares reached an intra-day peak of 31c just after market open — marking a 47.6 per cent gain over the prior day.

The stock closed up 21 per cent on Thursday.

LOM shares over the past year. Source: Investing.com

“The main goal of our drilling program at Brooking was to identify lamproitic material, which could be the primary source of the diamonds and indicator minerals recovered from the earlier surface sampling programs,” boss Stephen Weatherall told investors.

Lamproite is the same type of volcanic or subvolcanic rock that lies within Rio Tinto’s Argyle mine, one of the world’s largest suppliers of diamonds.

It looks like Lucapa may have done just that: 119 diamonds, including 7 macro-diamonds of up to 1 millimetre, were recovered from 86.8 kilograms of core sample from the one hole drilled at the Little Spring Creek prospect.

Macro-diamonds recovered from Little Spring Creek. Pic: Lucapa Diamond Company.

Lucapa says the diamonds are similar to the company’s nearby Ellendale mine, which when in production produced more than half of the world’s annual supply of fancy yellow diamonds.

Little Spring Creek is located within 50 kilometres of the Ellendale mine in the West Kimberely region of Western Australia.

Lucapa now plans to follow up the discovery with further drilling and bulk sampling programs.

Last year the company netted a pretty $9.2 million from its September auction of alluvial diamonds mined at the Lulo project in Angola, which also produced a monster 163-carat gem.