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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Wednesday was a mediocre 69-89-152 as the TSX Venture Exchange fell one point to 554. Ewan Mason's Star Diamond Corp. (DIAM) closed unchanged at nine cents on 147,000 shares.

And here you thought Star Diamond was merely chasing billions of dollars of diamonds buried deep beneath the Fort a la Corne forest in central Saskatchewan for potential profits. This week, Mr. Mason, chairman and interim chief executive officer, and George Read, senior vice-president of corporate development, cheered the environmental good that a mammoth mine might accomplish. Kimberlite, you see, contains a large amount of olivine, which can react with carbon dioxide and remove carbon from the atmosphere.

This is not just some half-baked new idea by Star Diamond. The company's soon-to-be-former co-venturer on the Fort a la Corne project, Rio Tinto Exploration Canada Inc., was first to put the idea into the oven, through studies it contracted with academics at the University of Alberta. Essentially, the work shows that the olivine in the kimberlite contains serpentine group weathering products led by lizardite. (No, it was not named by a geologist with a reptilian fetish, nor did its name derive from its occasionally scaly nature -- it was first observed on the Lizard peninsula in southwestern England.)

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