Could be even better than DSO at Quicksilver, Bluey, if we can...

Could be even better than DSO at Quicksilver, Bluey, if we can indeed hook into this nickel enriched vermiculite.

Not that DSO would be any too shabby.

The vermiculite is showing really high grade, 2-3% nickel - which would sell just as DSO at between $300-$400/t. My understanding is the vermiculite has so far been really easy to separate, just using screens and scrubbing.

So let’s say 10% of the ore is vermiculite, costing us $8/t to mine – so we’d have to mine 10:1 to get 1 tonne vermiculite ore – so that’s costing us $80-90/t to make, and selling it for $300-400/t.

AND the transportation costs plummet, because suddenly we’re not moving so much of the material. (Transportation costs would come down from about 50% to only about 10% of costs.)


But as I say, this thing could become even better.

With high-grade material like that it’s likely we’ll be able to make a battery mineral out of it because it’ll be able to sustain an atmospheric leach process. At which point we’re talking about $10,000-15,000/t (!) and practically no transportation cost, because we’ll only be transporting 50t-100t at a time, not 30,000t.


There’s a lot of water needs to flow under the bridge ‘til any of this might eventuate - not least identifying the geometry and orientation of the layers and seams of high-grade Ni-Co vermiculite we'll now be hunting through the ore zone.

But you can see the possibilities.