Testwork from Chalice Mining’s Gonneville nickel-copper-cobalt project in Western Australia has demonstrated the project will not require a hydrometallurgical process for nickel concentrate.
Chalice described the testwork results as “exceptional”, saying they demonstrated that two saleable, smelter-grade flotation concentrates can be produced across the entire Gonneville sulphide resource.
The findings mean technical risk, process complexity and capital and operating costs are substantially reduced.
“The ability to produce a saleable nickel concentrate across the grade spectrum of the entire Gonneville resource is a major breakthrough and fundamentally simplifies the world-class Gonneville project,” Chalice managing director and chief executive officer Alex Dorsch said.
“Removing the need for a hydrometallurgical process materially reduces both the capital and operating costs and, together with the optimisations being introduced to the flowsheet, is expected to deliver a significant improvement in project margins across all high-grade and low-grade phases of a bulk open-pit mine plan.”
Dorsch said Gonneville’s uniqueness meant the team had to work hard to ‘crack the code’ on the metallurgy.
“This is a significant achievement by Chalice’s technical team and supporting laboratories, so I would like to commend and thank all those involved,” he said.
“It is also clear that the project continues to improve as we do more testwork. In addition to the flowsheet development work, we continue to make significant progress in optimising the project in other areas and we look forward to finalising the preferred development option for the pre-feasibility study this quarter.”
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