He had casually found a diamond.
This kind of luck made General Maups very happy, and at the same time, it made his own statement more credible.
"This is kimberlite, and it's very easy for diamonds to form." Ye Qing also looked at it in the sun. The quality of the raw diamond in front of him was good, and it faintly showed a bright silver metallic luster in the sun.
This was an unpolished raw diamond. After polishing, its quality should be able to reach WS2, and its luster would become multi-colored.
Ye Qing casually tossed the stone to one of General Maups's attendants, and asked him to take it to the straw shed to retrieve the diamond. Then he said to General Maups, "From what we've observed so far, this diamond mine is a little small."
"But the quality of the raw diamond is good, and there should be a certain amount of raw diamond reserves in the underground rock belt."
General Maups breathed a sigh of relief. It was fine as long as Ye Qing was satisfied.
In addition, General Maups wasn't surprised by the news that there was a rock belt underground, and that there was likely to be diamonds in the rock belt.
Because from the experience of international diamond mining, most diamonds were associated with rocks.
But there was a problem with the cost of mining here.
Diamond ores were different from metals or other minerals. They could be extracted from ores through modern and industrialized methods. The rarity of diamonds determined that the chances of them being associated with rocks were very, very low.
They couldn't be smelted by normal industrial means, and could only be sorted out by the workers' final hand.
If they wanted to sort them out manually, they would have to strip tons of stones that might contain diamonds from the rock belt, and then break them into uniform matchbox-sized gravel.
When they were unlucky, they wouldn't even be able to pick out a single diamond from ten tons of raw stones.
This was a wilderness where the industry was extremely backward, and even the basic power supply was difficult to guarantee. This was a land where European and American jewelers firmly controlled the pricing power of diamonds.
In this case, whoever tried to mechanize the diamonds in the rock on a large scale would lose everything.
Even Ye Qing wasn't sure that there would be a considerable amount of diamonds hidden in the rock formation underground after mining the hard soil on the surface.
It was getting late, and Ye Qing had people collect some gravel and hard soil to take back for testing and analysis.
When the convoy returned, the setting sun had almost merged with the earth.
The four hard-looking off-road vehicles sped across the wild brown land. By the time the convoy arrived at the capital city of Anut, it was already eight o 'clock in the evening.
Now, the capital city was beginning to show signs of a modern city. In addition to the city's infrastructure provided by the Monster Industries, General Maups had also invested in a four-star hotel and reserved an exclusive suite on the top floor that was far better than a five-star hotel.
This room was specially used to receive Ye Qing. After Ye Qing checked in, he called the general manager of the factory, Tan Jinghao, over.
Now, Tan Jinghao was holding a list of factory equipment and waiting for Ye Qing's instructions.
Immersive spiral classifier.
Ore powder processing system.
Centrifuge cluster for enriched uranium.
Supercritical unit power generation unit.
Adjustable magnetic field generator …
Ye Qing scanned the list of equipment one by one and soon had a comprehensive understanding of the equipment and types of engineering vehicles currently equipped at the Nigeria factory. Ye Qing, who owned a large business, did not know the specific types before this.
If you want to mine diamonds on a large scale, advanced industrial mining equipment is indispensable.
Among them, the Mechanical Colossus Type X is of course one of the main mining forces.
But it is only responsible for stripping the raw ore from the soil or rock, and then how to accurately pick out the diamonds from the raw ore is the core problem.
The factory in Nigeria was originally designed to extract dysprosium metal and other rare earth metal elements from monazite mines on a large scale. The factory has perfect raw ore processing conditions.
However, Ye Qing finished looking at the list of types in the factory and found that he could only use these equipment to carry out the three steps of mining, crushing, and preliminary screening.
The most critical step, how to do it …
Tan Jinghao, the general manager of the factory, saw his boss lost in thought. He knocked his head and thought about it. He was not sure: "Boss, I remember that the super diamond mine in Russia uses the heavy medium beneficiation technology."
"Can we also use this technical idea?"
"Heavy medium beneficiation?" Ye Qing shook his head.
Of course, he knows about the super diamond mine in Russia. The super diamond mine in Siberia is said to store far more reserves than all the known diamond mines in the world.
The origin of the diamond mine was a magical coincidence that a huge meteorite hit the ground tens of millions of years ago, so that the terrifying pressure and high temperature burst out in an instant, carbonizing the ground material into diamonds.
Unfortunately, these are not diamonds that are normally condensed in nature. Its main component is composed of Lonsdale stone, and it is doped with graphite and diamond components.
It is not pure, nor is it transparent and flawless, similar to the principle of synthetic diamonds. It can only be used for industrial processing, and there is no possibility of becoming jewelry.
Otherwise, how can Russia have the leisure to maintain the stability of the diamond market, and these diamonds would have made a lot of money in the international jewelry and diamond market.
As for the heavy medium beneficiation, this kind of use of the density of diamond-containing raw ore is different from the density of ordinary rock. Then, a suspension of the same density is specially proportioned, and the raw ore is placed in the suspension to make the denser diamond-containing raw ore slowly sink to the bottom. The technology is suitable for the super diamond mine in Russia.
But it is not suitable here, at least the diamond mine that Ye Qing went to inspect in the afternoon.
The super diamond mine was produced by the impact of a meteorite. Its density of raw ore and diamond distribution are highly uniform, and the suspension can effectively separate diamond-containing raw ore.
But the distribution of diamond-containing raw ore in Nigeria does not have the slightest pattern to find. Those raw ores that do not contain diamonds may also contain other denser minerals, using heavy medium beneficiation technology. The poor diamonds selected are not enough for the cost of configuring the suspension.
After explaining the principle to Tan Jinghao, Tan Jinghao had no idea for a while.
There are only three kinds of diamond mining technologies used internationally, and in the end, these three can not avoid the step of manual selection.
Seeing Tan Jinghao there wanting to help him share the burden, but unable to do so, Ye Qing said with some amusement, "It's not as complicated as you think."
As for the last step of how to accurately select diamonds from the raw ore, there is now a preliminary plan to imagine. After the inspection of the three diamond mines, more detailed solutions can be developed according to the characteristics of these diamond mines.
Tan Jinghao curiously asked about the plan.
Ye Qing gently said two words, "hardness."
… …
Early the next morning, Ye Qing inspected the second diamond mine under General Maups.
This diamond mine is located not far from the only modern port in Nigeria, Hackett Port.
The diamond mine here originally belonged to General Boggs, the owner of Hackett Port. Now Boggs has become a general under General Maups, and the ownership of the diamond mine is of course not complicated.
The diamond mine is located in a huge lake.
The uncanny workmanship of nature had created this peculiar diamond vein.
According to General Maups, this diamond mine was first discovered 50 years ago. At that time, the locals often fished in this lake. As a result, a lucky fisherman went down with a net and fished up a sparkling stone.
Of course, the stone itself does not shine. It can shine because there are more than a dozen diamonds of different sizes stuck to the surface.
The largest one is the size of a pigeon egg, and the smallest is only the size of a grain of rice.
Later, one after another, local fishermen touched stones inlaid with diamonds in the water, and finally attracted the attention of the rulers of this land.
The lake area is three times the size of the diamond mine on the other side of the forest. The lake water is very shallow, only two meters deep.
Workers mine diamonds by building a circle of dams in the lake with manpower, then pumping out the lake water in the dam, and then touching stones in the mud.
Diamonds are not necessarily inlaid in stones, and some are mixed in the mud, requiring a large number of workers to squeeze the mud little by little.
The diamond mine production in this lake is not small, but the quality of the raw diamond is usually only a very small number of WS1-level diamonds.
After collecting samples from this diamond mine, the convoy went to the third diamond mine.
The diamond mine is located at the edge of the Western Region, only one step away from the Tagana Country.
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