Pertinent market/industry news/articles, page-4745

A few additional thoughts.

From p.26 of ARL announcement dd 16 June 2021:
"For the purposes of removing unlikely to be economic resources from the resource statement, TME Mine Consulting (TME) carried out a pit optimisation for the Highway deposit using a “blue sky” US$27,558 per tonne nickel price (consistent with the price used for similar pit optimisation work as part of the Ardea PFS in 2018, and Heron in 2013 when converting earlier JORC 2004 compliant resource estimates to JORC 2012 compliant estimates).

A “blue sky” US$64,485 per tonne cobalt price was also applied in the resource pit optimisation work undertaken by TME.
Appropriate mining and processing costs and other costs were also used to complete the resource optimisation work. The entire Highway MRE based on a 0.5% Ni cut-off grade is deemed potentially economic based on the resource optimisation parameters and therefore have been reported as Mineral Resources in this report."

As the prices of Ni/Co have dropped significantly since then, ARL raised its cut-off value from 0.5% to 0.8%, which is consistent with the reasoning provided in the earlier post, being that the higher the price, the lower the cut-off, and vice-versa.

If/when prices return to higher levels, then the cut-off might be reduced to 0.5% again. The difference is 1,817kt - 874kt = 943kt additional Ni available for economic extraction. (MRE data as per slides 31 & 32 of the recent Battery Metals Conference Presentation by AP.)

Then there's the USD-AUD exchange rate, and the political manouver to overthrow the USD supremacy and replace with the BRICS currency.
ARL's Ni/Co production is planned to commence in 2027, which means that the cut-off value might be revised to the BRICS-AUD exchange rate.
Even if the USD-AUD exchange rate is kept, presumably because ARL's buyers are from the Western countries, the USD might be considerably devalued/weakened due to the BRICS currency out of a need to remain globally competitive.

Assuming that the 0.8% cut-off scenario remains, and all other factors also remain as per PFS 2018 assumptions.
What I haven't been able to figure out is whether there is a bonus buffer of 0.2% (1.0% Ni grade - 0.8% cut-off) Ni that might result in an increase in Ni production in contrast to the reported Ni content at 1.0% that analysts use to estimate NPV and IRR.

Perhaps posters here might know?
Or RED can enquire with AP in a future communication with him?