You guys say that he was wasting time exploring their ground...

You guys say that he was wasting time exploring their ground instead of focusing on uranium. However clearly that's laid the foundation for a demerger as the nickel has a lot of potential at base of a 7.5km unbroken length. Those were massive and semi massive nickel sulphides and thick. In fact a lot of their ground is highly prospective and needs more exploration so this is a very good move

https://unauthorised investment advice/resources/explainer-so-you-think-you-can-drill-how-to-read-nickel-and-copper-exploration-results/

A good nickel hit

Nickel is usually found in two main ore types – sulphide or laterite.

Sulphides (class 1) are much cheaper and easier to turn into battery grade nickel sulphate than nickel laterites and fetch a higher price.

But supply of nickel sulphides is also declining because of a lack of new discoveries.

Looking for a good hit of nickel sulphide?

Jon Hronsky was one of Western Mining Corporation’s top geologists back in the day and is credited with leading the team that found the West Musgrave nickel and copper deposit on the WA-SA border in the late 1990s.

West Musgrave is one of only a handful of large scale nickel sulphide discoveries in WA in the past three decades. A decision on its $1.1 billion development by current owner OZ Minerals (ASX:OZL) is expected this year.

Now the boss at consultancy Western Mining Services, Hronsky knows just about every major nickel field in the world like the back of his hand.

He says a good nickel sulphide hit will typically be something at least 2m wide with around 1.5-2% nickel or higher. But … Context. Is. Everything.

“It’s never just about the results, it’s always about the context the results get fitted into,” he said.

“I know everyone looks at the highlight results and in fact companies deliberately emphasise results out of context because you know, a lot of investors, particularly the sort of more naive investors, do have that sort of heuristic, rule of thumb that they just respond to the actual numbers in intersections.”

Take Sirius Resources’ announcement of the Nova nickel-copper mine for example. Out on its ass and with its bank account near bone dry, Sirius announced a strike on July 26, 2012 of 4m at 3.8% nickel and 1.42% copper right where its electromagnetic modelling told it to look about 190m underground.

But there were other important tidbits that suggested the now ~30,000tpa mine was the real deal.

A step out hole after the discovery intersected 15m of similar matrix to massive style sulphide mineralisation 55m up-dip from the discovery, pointing to a major, consistent ore body, with a new style of mineralisation in a largely unexplored mineral province.

“One of the first things to evaluate when you get a result is: is this some new discovery, some new area where that hole could be the first hole in a big orebody — like say the first hole into Nova — or is this a drill hole that’s only drilled a few metres away from known existing mineralisation?” Hronsky adds.

“If it was a small ore body before and you drill another hole and get another intersection a few metres away it’s still a small ore body.”

Disseminated to the massives

Sulphide nickel deposits like those found in WA’s Kambalda Dome are prized over other forms of nickel in the western world for a few reasons.

Firstly, they are relatively simple to process into a concentrate and cheap to produce in comparison to other kinds of nickel like shallow laterites.

Secondly, they can be easily converted into pure nickel briquettes accepted by the London Metals Exchange and nickel sulphate, the chemical used in nickel-rich lithium ion battery chemistries in Tesla EVs.

For that reason, these kinds of nickel deposits are the most important for investors wedded to the battery metal thematic to get their heads around.

The narrow veined high grade sulphide drill hits common to Kambalda, Kalgoorlie and elsewhere in WA generate the tastiest looking results.

“In terms of (a good hit for) nickel you could think of sort of higher grade massive sulphide nickel where we might have a few meters — and this is what a lot of Kambalda stuff would be — so maybe between 2-10 meters of intersection, and the grade we’d be looking for usually over that interval we’d want certainly more than 1% nickel, ideally more than 2% nickel, and sometimes it can be a bit higher than that,” Hronsky says.

“But you want intervals that are thicker than about two meters, and grades that are higher than about one and a half or 2% as sort of a minimum that’s in sulphide nickel.”

But large scale disseminated sulphide intersections can be equally valuable, and provide a platform for large, long life production.

The most obvious example in Australia is BHP’s (ASX:BHP) Mt Keith mine, which along with the high grade Leinster underground project makes up its northern operations around 400km north of Kalgoorlie-Boulder.

Developed by WMC in the 1990s, Mt Keith feeds a ~40Mtpa concentrator with a resource grade averaging around 0.6% nickel.

“You can also have intersections of still sulphide, but disseminated, nickel, where you might have several 10s of meters, 50 to 100 meters,” Hronsky said.

“And in those sort of intersections there will be lower grades between 0.4-0.6% nickel, that might be significant.

“So obviously, if it’s narrower it has to be higher grade, if it’s lower grade, it has to be wider and thicker.

“The other point is that if it’s a low grade intersection but it’s 500m deep, it’s not going to be very relevant because the low grade will only be relevant if you can mine it in an open pit.

“Whereas high grade, if it’s five meters at 5% nickel or 10% nickel, that’s something you could mine in a deep underground mine so it doesn’t matter whether it’s deep. So (depth) is another important filter.”