I've been keen to subscribe for, or buy into NiCo. In fact one of the main reasons i got interested in MLX was Wingellina.
Unfortunately, Nifty scared me away then, as it looked like a company destroyer. Little did i know it would 6 times within the year, and it would be renison of all things taking it there.
But hey, i don't know enough about the macro picture on Tin to have predicted a doubling in Tin prices which would make a margin even sometimes cash drain mine to an absolute cash printer. I don't think many would have predicted Tin going over 24k, let alone to 40k so no point kicking myself over and over (only went and put it on metro mining instead to 1/5th my money instead)... Anyway rambles aside, I had a few questions since MLX obviously held this for a while, will be grateful for any insights.
Wingellina looks like an absolute monster deposit, yet it's never received any coverage or much love, heck even from MLX itself? Is there a deeper geological or mining reason for this? I mean Wingellina has more cobalt than cobalt blue and at comparable grades.. and one project is asking to be a cobalt pureplay? Is there something inherently flawed about Wingellina which makes it unattractive? Like many gold deposits, or Nifty..
The Phase 1 feasibility was done during the first commodities superbubble of 2007/8 so it makes sense why the prices were so inflated (for the time anyway, Nickel 20000 which is the price after a massive run up this year, and cobalt 4000. Though their USD rate is a bit nicer. First question is, is the full PFS ever published? I found a summary, but would be keen to see deposits, pit concepts, justifications for capex/opex?
Capex Cost, Wingellina's PFS quotes 2.7BAUD as it's cost, that's massive and makes me doubt about development on it's own unless they get a BCI type deal with NAIF. Will modern processing bring this cost down?
Opex Cost, The PFS Opex is an ungodly AUD4.97 per Lb even after Cobalt Credits. Compared to for example WSA at mid 3's, that's 50% higher. Now i know WSA's current ops are quite low on the cost curve (or were), but once again is this a feature of the PFS being almost 1.5 decades old and likely to be substantially lower, or is this a feature of the deposit, chemistry. I'm using 15k/t US Nickel as base, and their 12.2k/t without credits is a bit high to make it a potential escondida type operation.
Jinchuan, they were involved in this, china's biggest nickel producer, yet they seemingly abandoned it. I think they still own an MLX stake, but you'd think they'd be telling the board, we'll take it for double that price? Nickel prices collapsed in 2014-2018, but still seems bizzare the world leader in nickel walks from what presents itself as a Tier 1 nickel opportunity. Was there something else at play? Google failed to yield meaningful results.
On the surface it looks tempting, but I know all too well, there's cursed deposits, infeasible deposits or areas which are just too difficult to develop (Nifty, Cyclone for Diatreme, Wonarah (until now maybe), wherever Dacian decides to mine, so on) the list is long, and just don't want to dive in without the full story.
As before, thanks in advance.
MLX Price at posting:
53.5¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
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