Hi Leinad, Thanks for posting a succinct account of your understandings of issues raised at Wednesday's meeting. Your contribution is greatly appreciated. I would also like to extend my appreciation to Julie and OT for their valuable posts. Posts of these standards epitomise the sense of sharing on the SGQ forums. Well done to you three.
One thing that particularly interests me is the potential commercial production of ore to concentrate. It is now very clear that smelting of our concentrates will need to be done off shore.
The metallurgical flow sheet will include include production details of ore to concentrate. The obvious question is where will the concentrates be produced. It seems, that whilst there are concentrator facilities in WA, they are limited to nickel concentrate and not PGEs.
In April this year, Argonaut in an analyst report, had this to say:
"SGQ has appointed Entech as its external geological consultant to estimate a maidenMineral Resource at the Mt Alexander Project. This will lead into a Scoping Study which will focus on shallow, open pittablemineralisation. While there are a number of existing nickel concentrator plants within trucking distance to the project,
we believe thestudy will focus on the construction of a small on-site concentrator plant. This is because regional plants have little capability toseparate the significant by-product metals present at Mt Alexander’s mineralisation, including copper, cobalt, PGEs and rhodium. Asmall, 200-400ktpa flotation plant would require minimum upfront capital, but could generate significant cash flow to advance furtherexploration and development of a larger scale operation (pending further exploration success)."
It would appear that SGQ will consider this as an option for producing concentrates.
The obvious questions for this scenario are:
1. What would be the cost to construct a 200-400ktpa floatation plant?;
2. Is 200-400ktpa large enough for future discoveries and can a plant of this size be upgraded?:
3. What would be the time frame for construction? and;
4. How would the cost be financed?
In regard to the first 3 questions, I have no capacity to answer. If anyone has any ideas or first hand experience of floatation plants, please jump in and comment.
Cheers
Mulac1
(20min delay)