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Russian top diamond producer invests $211 million in production development

Within 2018 the company will begin projecting and will start buying additional mining equipment

ARKHANGELSK, March 7. /TASS/. Russia’s Alrosa diamond producer will invest 12 billion rubles ($211 million) in further development of the Lomonosov deposit in the Arkhangelsk Region, Director General of Severalmaz (Alrosa’s subsidiary) Andrei Pismennyi told reporters on Wednesday.

"The decision was to begin implementing a large-scale project with the life-term to 2043," he said. "Our deposit consists of six pipes, and now we have been working on the so-called southern group of pipes, and we are opening pipes Arkhangelskaya and Karpinskogo-1. The decision is to have reconstruction at those pits, to build up amounts of produced ore <…> That would be the third stage [of the deposit’s development], and reconstruction of the Karpinskogo-1 and Arkhangelskaya pipes is estimated at 12 billion rubles."

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Within 2018, he continued, the company will begin projecting and will start buying additional mining equipment. "According to the forecast, we shall work at the southern group of pipes to 2035, and from 2035 we shall go to the northern group of pipes, which are 5-6 km from the southern: those are pipes Pionerskaya, Lomonosovskaya - there we shall be to 2043-2045," he added.

Severalmaz is a Russian diamond mining company, Alrosa’s subsidiary. It owns a license for Europe’s biggest diamond deposit named after Lomonosov, where production began in 2005 from a mining-enriching plant with the capacity of one million tonnes of ore a year. The second stage of the company’s development began with the start of operations at the factory’s second module in 2014, with the annual capacity of 3 million tonnes of ore.

The Arkhangelsk Region has two diamond deposits. In 2017, diamond mining companies earned there about 25 billion rubles ($440 million), where almost 4 billion ($70 million) were paid in taxes. Experts say, in 2017, about 7.5 million carats of diamond were produced in the Arkhangelsk Region.

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