Transcript:
My name’s Steve Norregaard, I’m the Managing Director of Widgie Nickel.
We recently released a scoping study on a nickel project for the Mount Edwards project located in the southeast Goldfields region of Western Australia.
The project itself we have got a substantial resource base of some hundred and 90,000 tonnes of nickel.
Our scoping study contemplates mining five of those resources and we’ve been able to put together a successful mining venture that contemplates mining just over 5 million tonnes at 1.56% nickel.
That represents a six year production life of sustainable production at a rate of 800,000 tonnes per annum. The scoping study uses a price of 24,000 US and 0.65 exchange rate, reflecting the midpoint of pricing during the previous twelve months.
The project itself only contemplates mining five of twelve resources with ample opportunity for us to see the project increase in life by virtue of mining the seven that haven’t been considered currently.
What stands this project out from many others is that we’re contemplating building our own standalone nickel concentrator on site in order to be able to reduce our operating costs and make us the lowest possible cost quartile producer.
That comes with a capital cost burden of some $270,000,000 in order to be able to get ourselves into production.
But importantly, with an IRR of just under 23% initially calculated with increases in mine life which are readily evident for us, we’ll be able to see those financial metrics improve.
Nickel is now a strategic commodity in the eyes of the Australian Government and this project has significance in the sense that it can be a long life, low cost project and it has a low carbon footprint, unlike nickel laterites being developed in Indonesia.
If you’d like to find out more about the company or the project, check out our socials or our website.
