Wally Graham, The Resources Roadhouse: Hi and welcome to The Resources Roadhouse. I'm Wally Graham, and today I am joined by Damon Dormer, Managing Director of Golden Mile Resources. Damon, welcome back to The Roadhouse. It's good to see you.
Damon Dormer, Managing Director of Golden Mile Resources: Yep, great see you too, Wally.
Graham: Alright before we get into the nitty gritty of …you've just released an announcement for your Quicksilver project - a new Flowsheet there - before we get into that, can you just give us a bit of an update, or a recap should I say, of what the Quicksilver project actually is.
Dormer: So thanks, Wally. The Quicksilver project, just to refresh everyone’s memory, is a 26Mt nickel oxide deposit down near Lake Grace. We have a nickel grade about 0.64% nickel and 0.04% cobalt. But certainly over the course of the last year, as you know Wally, that we've had two drill programs done there, we've done a huge amount of Met Testwork which has given us a very different understanding of this ore body as well, which is then reflected in …obviously getting into the Flowsheet …reflected in the work culminating there. Graham: Alright, so the ore body. What has the work demonstrated about the ore body that’s sort of been the impetus behind this Flowsheet? Dormer: Look, there's a couple of key points here. The first one is, where we thought we would be early last year was focused on just getting to a general grade uplift through beneficiation. What we've seen is the ability to break out from this Flowsheet into four nickel products that we can create separately. They can have different pricings within the market. We've also learned the significance of the mica and chloriTe within this ore body for it containing the really high-grade nickel that we've seen throughout the course of the Testwork. And that's been a real big change in how we look at this thing.
Graham: All right. So what's the benefit of having the four different nickel products, for want of a better term, that came out of this - instead of just the one concentrate.
Dormer: Look, the higher you can get the nickel grade obviously the better the price …in relative terms …the better the price you can command for that product, and obviously the relatively lower transportation costs that comes with it.So there's two parts to it. One is the overall economics on which you look at this thing, and the value you can derive.The second one actually really ties into the secondary processing options that we're looking at within our forward works. So having the different streams allows us to look at different leaching technologies as a secondary process option on the different streams. So we may find certain streams come up really well; others maybe not so well. But having them separate, lets us treat them individually at this level. And then as we further progress Quicksilver, it may be more beneficial to combine a couple of the streams if that is the right value proposition for us.
Graham: So the announcement the other day of the Flowsheet - what is it going to achieve?
Dormer: Okay, so what it gives us is, it allows us to separate our high-grade mica concentrate which is running out at …you know, we saw grades in the test work touching on the mica up to 5% nickel, and we’re seeing an overall average grade around the 2.5% mark there. It allows us …we've got that magnetite product, if you remember, which is a nice, clean 54% iron-nickel-chromium concentrate (but importantly, very low silica) that's tested up to be cleaned really well. We've also got a fine-grain nickel which is our lower grade component which we’d certainly want to do some secondary processing on to beef that up. And then we've got a cobalt. What we identified a bit earlier in the year was this cobalt band within the ore body, and through the test work, where we're getting a nice nickel-cobalt-manganese product which has a really good nickel to cobalt ratio - and I'll just highlight that, because it's got a very big benefit into the products for the battery Industries as an intermediate product for the p-CAM market.
Graham: What does that mean for the project in general. Does it mean that you can advance it quicker or is it still quite a lot of work to do there?
Dormer: Look, what we're doing to go forward with this, now that we've got the Flowsheet and everything else with it, we need to rebuild our economic models - you know, our internal ones. And then we run through a whole …for want of a better term, we ‘stress test’ it. We flex all the parameters, both technical and financial, to look at where the best bang for buck lies in prioritising the test works going forward. So we'll conduct that work, we'll form the hit list of programs that we want to progress, and then just work through those steady state as we go.
Graham: All right. So is that pretty much it now in a nutshell for Quicksilver at the moment? Are we expecting any more news there? Dormer: After we do the economic assessment, we'll start some you know I reckon we’ll be starting some more testwork programs with Quicksilver that will tick along. We're still just holding off the drilling programs for now as we derive the value as we conduct these assessments. And then we'll look at where to for Quicksilver from there in cognisance of the market. The nickel market has certainly picked up in recent times but we're certainly cognisant of the market there as well.
Graham: Look, that sounds like some pretty exciting stuff for Quicksilver. It's been a project I know that you've really wanted to advance and to move along. So it's good to see that things are happening there. As always, make sure you keep in touch and make sure we can keep the news flowing out from Golden Mile Resources.
Dormer: Oh look …look forward to chatting again soon, Wally.
G88 Price at posting:
1.3¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
