Rio Tinto reported a 2% decline in diamond production from its fully owned Diavik mine in Northwest Territories, Canada to 991,000 carats for Q1 2022 compared with 1.007 million carats recovered in Q1 2021. The Q1 2022 output was 14% lower than the preceding Q4 2021.
“At Diavik, carats recovered in the first quarter were 2% lower than the first quarter of 2021 due to lower availability of ore driven by significant impacts from Covid-19 including unplanned employee absences, offset by an increased share of production from November 2021. Processing throughput was also impacted by an unplanned outage in the first quarter,” the company said. For the full year 2021, Rio Tinto’s diamond output was 3.84 million carats. On 17th November 2021, Rio Tinto’s ownership interest in Diavik increased from 60% to 100%.