PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Nickel developer Poseidon Nickel on Monday said that it would revisit a direct shipping ore (DSO) option for the Black Swan operation, in Western Australia, once a preliminary mining schedule for both the Silver Swan and Golden Swan deposits was in place.
Poseidon MD and CEO Peter Harold told shareholders that the DSO operation could provide interim cashflow ahead of the recommissioning of the 1.1-million processing plant at Black Swan.
“Since announcing our ‘fill the mill’ strategy in July, the company has made considerable progress on work-streams progressing our Black Swan project towards a restart, targeting late 2022 plant commissioning.
“Of particular importance, we have released our maiden Golden Swan resource, commenced resource drilling at Silver Swan to convert inferred resource to indicated and begun drilling of the Black Swan disseminated orebody to increase confidence on the grade and the amount of serpentinite ore in this resource.
“We have also released a maiden resource on the Silver Swan tailings and commenced metallurgical test work on blending the various feed sources through the Black Swan 2.2-million-tonne-a-year concentrator, derated to 1.1-million tonnes a year. These workstreams are aiming to create a longer life project, produce a marketable concentrate and optimise the project economics compared to the 2018 Black Swan study, which only treated ore for 25 months and produced a low iron/magnesium oxide concentrate that would be more challenging to sell in the current market.”