The world's largest diamond mining ship has begun construction at the Kleven Verft shipyard in Norway. De Beers, the world's largest diamond miner and the world's largest diamond miner, confirmed the news recently.

It is understood that the new ship, with a new era meaning, will be built exclusively for coastal operations in namibia and is expected to enter service in 2021.

As early as 2017, namibia Debmarine, a joint venture between the government of namibia and the De Beers group, was the first to announce a feasibility study for the ship. At the end of last year, De Beers and the Norwegian firm Kleven Verft signed a letter of intent.

The construction of the ship is expected to cost 2 billion yuan ($173 million), namibia and about 5 billion yuan ($432 million) in namibia mission equipment, including caterpillar dredger, technology, will be in after the completion of the new ship to be modified.

After consider to choose between several yards, finally the Norwegian Kleven Verft shipyard selected, because the shipyard has successfully built last year and delivered the deep water exploration ship "Nujoma" diamonds, this new ship order at the end of 2014, and in 2017 July delivery Debmarine company was put into operation, it is also a Kleven won first in the field of underwater mining new ship orders.

The new ship will be the longest built by Kleven shipyard so far, 176 meters long and 27 meters wide, slightly longer than the current largest ship, the Mafuta, which is 174 meters long. Similar to the Nujoma, the new ship will be designed with Marin Teknikk's MT6027, also with a dynamic positioning capability and a mining equipment developed by DE beers.