Monster machines drive De Beers fleet

Hidden away in Cape Town"s dockland is an anonymous building where diamond giant De Beers is spending billions on technology in any currency.

De Beers was one of South Africa's first multinational South African companies. It was founded in 1888 by Cecil John Rhodes, and at one stage controlled all the global flows of diamonds. Now it is focusing on trawling the ocean floor for diamonds using immense sea vessels.

Visitors to the De Beers facility are greeted by what looks like a giant steel lobster - aptly named a "crawler" - which operates by lurching from side-to-side to scour the ocean floor 120m below the surface.

This gadget alone, constructed using 280-tons of steel, cost De Beers about R150-million to design and manufacture.

The company now owns two crawlers - a green machine on its crawler ship, Mafuta, and an orange machine at the Cape Town facility.

This increasingly sophisticated technology is the future of the diamond miner - 85% owned by Anglo American - as it comes up with ever more innovative places to find its sought-after gems.

The plan is working. On Friday, De Beers revealed its operating profit had climbed 36% to $1.4-billion as it produced 32.6million carats of diamonds.

In a smaller room at the Cape Town facility, the De Beers team is working on a new patent for the crawler's nozzle.

There is a spark in the air when the technical team talk about the thinking behind this nozzle's new design - which is surrounded by about 30 prototypes of nozzle designs used over the years.

The crawler itself is small compared with its mother ship.

De Beers's fleet includes four drilling ships and one crawler ship that range in size from 120m to 170m long and almost 30m wide.

"It is like its own little city on water," said De Beers technical services general manager, Domingos Valblom.

A vessel stays at sea for about two or three years, but the 60 people needed to run its operations and other services only work rotational shifts.

"After 28 days, a helicopter comes to collect them and new staff members will take their place," he said.

The De Beers fleet's biggest vessel - Mafuta, which has been deployed to scour for diamonds off the Namibian coast - weighs 21000 tons and cost R4-billion to build.

But the work is never done at this gargantuan diamond trader, and some of the technology going into these vessels seems almost alien.

One can only wonder how long until we turn our gaze to the heavens, and look for new gems beyond earth.