Alrosa Could Start Work on New Mir Mine

(IDEX Online) - Alrosa says it could start work next year on Mir-Deep, as a successor to the ill-fate Mir, which closed after the 2017 flooding disaster that claimed eight lives.

The Russian miner said it was ready to bring forward implementation of the construction phase of the project (costed in 2024 at over $1.5 billion) based on the economic situation and a decrease in the cost of borrowed funds.

Mir-Deep (Mir‑Gluboky in Russian) will be built at the same site as the original Mir, in eastern Siberia, and involves sinking new shafts to reach deeper reserves, below the accident zone but within the same geological structure.

Mir opened in 1957 as the first diamond mine in what was then the USSR. It had been producing 3.8m carats before it closed - around a tenth of Alrosa's total production. The catastrophic flood destroyed the mine, its workings and machinery.

In an update on 28 April, Pavel Marinychev, Alrosa's CEO (pictured), said preparatory work, which began in 2023, had been completed and that Russia's Main State Expert Review (Glavgosexpertiza) had approved the mining of some reserves at the mine.

Back in September 2023 he said reserves of 173.5 million carats had been identified at the new mine. A more recent report by The State Commission on Reserves put the figure at around 200 million.