One of the world’s largest openpit nickel sulphide mines, Santa Rita in Brazil, is back in production, with Atlantic Nickel on Monday announcing the first sale of nickel concentrate from the mine that it bought in 2018.

Atlantic, which is owned by investment advisory firm Appian Capital, restarted blasting activities in July last year, and has now produced more than 11 000 dry metric tonnes.

It would deliver its first shipment this month.

Atlantic said it entered into a three-year offtake contract for a portion of Santa Rita's production and a $40.8-million financing arrangement with global commodities trading firm Trafigura. The deal provided the remaining funding required for the restart of the project.

Atlantic Nickel CEO Paulo Castellari commented that the official restart and first sale from Santa Rita was an important milestone that demonstrated the technical excellence of the team which brought the project back to production ahead of schedule.

“The team and I are now looking forward to bringing the asset to full capacity,” the former Anglo American executive commented in a statement.

Santa Rita was operated by Australia’s Mirabela Nickel for six years prior to being placed on care and maintenance in 2015. The project benefits from $1-billion of prior investment and has estimated production capacity of 6.5-million tonnes a year.

Atlantic Nickel has identified a 20-year-plus mine restart project.

Following on recent drilling results, an updated openpit reserve statement is planned for completion in the first quarter of 2020 and the company expects to undertake further drilling in 2020 to continue to grow and define the long life underground resource potential.

“Today's announcement further de-risks the project and I remain confident in Santa Rita's prospects as a low-cost, long-life mine that is well positioned to benefit from the growth in electric vehicles to generate strong investor returns,” said Castellari.

Castellari joined Appian in August last year to bring its two key projects – Santa Rita and the advanced greenfield Serrote copper/gold project – into production. The latter’s start date is targeted for next year.