London-listed Horizonte Minerals is nearing completion of its feasibility study for the Araguaia nickel project in Brazil and plans to release the final results to the market in October, the company reported on Thursday.

The feasibility study for Araguaia is designed around an openpit mining operation targeting 900 000 t/y of ore feeding a central processing rotary kiln electric furnace (RKEF) smelting facility, and designed to produce 14 500 t/y of nickel contained in 52 000 t of ferronickel.

The current mineral reserve supports a 28-year mine life with a two-year construction period.

“There has been a considerable amount of work involved in the optimisation of the plant layout and design where we have been able to successfully reduce the overall plant footprint, close-couple the equipment packages leading to a reduction in the overall material quantities (cut and fill material, concrete and steelwork). Additionally, we have now designed the plant in such a way to allow the potential to include a second RKEF process line in the future allowing for an increase in the annual nickel production.

“As the various feasibility workstreams are coming together, we have also been working hard on the social, infrastructure and licensing aspects of the project that will allow us to move to the development stage in 2019,” Horizonte CEO Jeremy Martin said.

The company is on track with its programme of licence applications and approvals, as well as with construction permit requests for a number of key environmental and regulatory parts of the overall project. Horizonte said it had obtained the water permit for full-scale operation of the Araguaia project and submitted the fauna and flora inventories, as well as the vegetation suppression request in early 2018.

In July, a team from the environmental agency, Semas, also visited the Araguaia project, which the company said was an important step in the process for the approval of the construction licence.

Commenting on the recent movements in metal prices relating to talk of tariff barriers, Martin said that the nickel price had been more resilient than the wider metals market, owing to its strong fundamentals.

LME inventories continue to be drawn down and the demand side driven by the stainless-steel market and electric vehicle battery sector continues to show strong growth, this bodes well for the longer-term fundamentals of nickel,” he said.