Alrosa Mines Last Open-pit Ore at Udachny

Russian diamond miner Alrosa reported in late July that it has completed mining at its Udachny open-pit mine in Yakutia, east Russia. An underground mine was commissioned on the Udachnaya pipe in June 2014, so production from the pipe is ongoing.

The Udachny open pit came into production in 1967 and grew to be Alrosa’s largest mine. About 350 million mt of ore containing rough diamonds worth around $80 billion were mined from the pit during its active life. The last 1.05 million mt of open-pit ore, containing about 1.7 million carats of rough diamonds, were mined in the first half of 2015. The surface area of the pit now measures 1,600 by 2,000 m, and it is 640 m deep.

The Udachny underground mine is building up to a design capacity of 4 million mt/y of ore and 5 million carats/y of contained diamonds, which it is scheduled to reach in 2019.

As featured in Womp 2015 Vol 09 - www.womp-int.com