The Lower Cretaceous Voorspoed kimberlite pipe is one of the six pipes which comprise the Kroonstadt Kimberlite Cluster located in the central region of the Kaapvaal Craton (South Africa). The pipe was initially described as a typical South African tuffisitic kimberlite (Skinner, Marsh, 2004) and later on as a pipe with a 2 km deep crater filled by pyroclastic sedimentation and resedimentation of kimberlite and country rock debris (Howarth, Skinner, 2012) due to the presence of bedded volcaniclastics at a depth of 2 km from the original land surface.

De Beers Voorspoed mine is an open-pit kimberlite mine that is situated 30 kilometres northeast of Kroonstad in the Free State, South Africa.

The plant includes the installation of high pressure rolls crushers to replace the relatively dated rod milling process used before, and two new secondary crushers, replacing the older technology cone crushers. The efficiency improvements have been achieved with the addition of a coarse Dense Medium Separation (DMS) Plant and by converting the existing DMS plant to a fines DMS plant, thus allowing for a more efficient DMS process. This will feed correctly prepared diamond bearing kimberlite to a new final recovery plant that includes the latest X-Ray diamond recovery technology. Much of the technology installed at Finsch was developed by DebTech, the De Beers Group’s technology research and manufacturing division based in the south of Johannesburg.