Hi charl It does not appear they are planning to do saprolites...

Hi charl
It does not appear they are planning to do saprolites and limonites combined. If they were it would be NPI produced as well as the sulphates and MHP as stated. They were stating 50kt of contained Ni so at a grading of say 1.3% and hoping for a 92% recovery ( which is being optimistic as utilising rotary kilns and HPAL) would mean processing approx 4.5Mtpa of ore.
Limonite is not suitable to go thru rotary kilns for the reasons I gave last night with the levels of contained fe, mgo. So it does not make sense if it is limonite that a rotary kiln then HPAL would be chosen. As to costing now at say 4.5Mt processed and Capex of US1.5Bln for 50Kt of contained Ni output would appear dubious at best. This would need to be at least a 3 kiln 2 very large Autoclave ( 3 more likely with maint downtime taken into consideration) eg of costing on plants of comparable size of output some being briquette output some being MHP
Murrin 40kt output initial cost US1.1B plus underestimate of US300M of upgrades not inclusive of heap leach addition plus 2.2% inflation input over 23yrs= US2.3b
Raventhorpe 50kt contained Ni in MHP US3.2B unadjusted for inflation
GORO designed at 60kt contained Ni in MHP output US5.2B unadjusted for inflation
Ambatovy designed at 60kt of Ni output in briquettes and powders US6B.
Ramu 33kt of Ni contained in MHP US2.4B
None of these plants utilised rotary kilns, HPAL only.

As to why as anned would Tsingshan and partners would require a Aust Junior to buy in and operate said facilility is confusing at best. Remember what happened with Highland Pacific with Ramu.
As to your question regarding the MHP part of output this could be directed via China for other uses such as Specialty alloy manufacture.