This post corrects a misleading comment I wrote on 16/03/23 that stated, “
WAK has been around for a decade preparing to exploit its Wickepin kaolin resources that it has owned for a decade.” To put the record right, WAK has been around since at least 1999.
I knew that a decade was too short, but I did not bother to be accurate, because it made little difference to the gist of what I wanted to communicate – that is, WAK is not a Johnny-came-lately story stock.
WAK had long kaolin-focused journey before it issued its Prospectus in November 2020. That journey was long enough, and the people involved skilled enough, to: develop the IP to build the plant to process the specific Wickepin kaolin resource; build a pilot plant large enough to be considered a small commercial plant, rather than a laboratory facility; and undertake actual product marketing on a small scale for a few years to sound out the commercial viability of the venture, which included an off-take agreement and LOIs .
WAK acquired the tenement area in 1999. After thoroughly studying the tenement, WAK established and operated a mine there between 2004 and 2014 while operating a pilot production facility in Kwinana. Kaolin processing techniques were developed and used in the initial stage of the project to produce products for ceramics, paper, and paint that were marketed to China, Japan, Korea, and India.
A wet and dry processing facility was planned between 2010 and 2013, but
the project was suspended due to lack of suitable investors. Those underlined words may be a euphemism to say that Plan A was not viable, and I suggest that part of the reason was the 2013 closure of the railway line that served the Wedin rail siding. Plan A included a 20K slurry pipeline to Wedin, and locating the usual elaborate wet-processing facilities there. Details of those plans can be found at
https://www.wickepin.wa.gov.au/asse...ap_-_minutes_-_no_5_-_shire_of_wickepin_1.pdf.
Every cloud has a silver lining, and Plan B seems to have improved the K90 process to a K99 (99% purity) process that was central to justifying Stage 1 and Stage 2 based on 200,000 tonnes a year each. The DFS and the ASX float then proceeded, but as these things are well documented and online, I'll not elaborate on them.
The recent Announcements refer to K999P, which suggests a 99.9% paper-grade kaolin, but no detail was provided, so I don't know if that requires a low-cost wet-processing step to lower viscosity using K99P as a feedstock, or if K999P is entirely produced via dry processing. Whatever it is, it's significant, IMO.
(20min delay)