Creating Diamonds in a Lab Takes Ten Times Less Energy than Mining Them

Conventional wisdom would suggest that creating a diamond aboveground takes a lot more energy than extracting an underground diamond that Earth has already created.  After all, diamond is created using intense amounts of temperature or pressure — so once formed, it should not take so much energy to harvest it. We researched the facts. It turns out it takes ten times more energy to extract an underground diamond from Earth than it takes to create one aboveground in a foundry. The miners are intentionally spreading confusion in the public through public relations and intentionally confusing studies. On top of this, the energy used in mining is generally dirty Diesel versus renewable energy in our above-the-ground production. The amount of energy required for underground mining is somewhat surprising — and a testament of how far innovation in aboveground diamond production technology has progressed over the years as well as how inefficient mining of underground diamonds tends to be, having to move huge quantities of soil in often highly remote areas. Innovation Drives Energy Efficiency Growing diamonds aboveground used to consume approximately 250kWh per carat a decade ago with first-generation technology. Today, through iterative and compounding technological iteration we have achieved at Diamond Foundry, we are at approximately one tenth that level. That's a 90% saving through innovation. Miners like to quote outliers and decade old data to confuse the public.  Mining diamonds takes ten times as much energy as creating them aboveground from scratch! The Facts: kWh per Carat Consumption Diamond mines operated by De Beers consume an average of 80.3 kWh per carat. The Canadian Diavik mines consumer 66 kWh per rough carat. [1, 2, 3] With a 25% polishing yield, this means each polished carat requires four times that amount. Each of these is ten times higher than what creating a diamond in a laboratory takes using the best available modern technology created by Diamond Foundry.   The Facts: Energy per Gem Quality Carat A true apples-to-apples comparison needs to look at the value produced versus the energy consumption. Those numbers are actually not hard to get hold of — it’s effectively just the wholesale value per total carats produced. De Beers recently produces diamonds at a wholesale value of $187 per (rough) carat. Alrosa produces diamonds in a way that 58% of the mining output is at a value of $166 per (rough) carat and 42% of the output has a value $10 per (rough) carat. [6] That’s an average of $100 per (rough) carat. Manmade diamonds have much higher quality and yield. Effectively the entire yield of a diamond foundry is 5-carat and larger (rough) diamond. No brown material. All high-value, pristine quality. The market prices of this in the global wholesale markets is an entire factor higher. The net of all of this is that, on an apples-to-apples comparison, foundry diamonds require an order of magnitude less energy to make than mined diamonds require to harvest. Cudos to the elegance of technological development! High Carbon Diesel versus Renewable Electricity Then the type of the energy used is very different of course: Mining in remote areas tends to require the use of Diesel generators whereas diamond foundries can be located in areas where they use solar power and other renewable sources of electricity. This means that regardless their energy consumption, foundry diamonds can be sustainably created whereas mined diamonds have a very large carbon footprint. Still what is perhaps more surprising is the sheer amount of energy involved is so high for mining. This in turn speaks to the fact that mining is very hard work — it requires moving hundreds of tons of soil for the hope of finding some good carats, etc.  But is is anything but sustainable. The Facts: Total Environmental Footprint An independent audit conducted on the total environmental footprint of various diamond mines and foundry producers show how vastly more environmental above-the-ground

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