PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Diversified miner Glencore this week confirmed its intentions to divest of the Cosmos nickel mine, in Western Australia.
The project was placed on care and maintenance in 2012, while still under the ownership of Xstrata, before being incorporated into the Glencore stable during the takeover of Xstrata in 2013.
Glencore’s head of global nickel assets, Peter Johnston, told investors this week that the company was continuing the divestment of its noncore nickel assets, which thus far had included the Stargate asset, in the Philippines, the Agmet operation, in the US, and the Sinclair mine, in Western Australia.
The company was now on the hunt for a buyer for the Cosmos mine, in the hopes of divesting the project within the next year.
Before its closure, Cosmos had been in production since 2000, and produced more than 2.9-million tons of ore, delivering 127 000 t of nickel in concentrate, including an estimated 4 200 t in 2012.
The divestment of Cosmos would leave Glencore with the Murrin Murrin mine as its sole nickel source in Australia.
Johnston said that the Araguaia nickel asset, in Brazil, and the Sipilou nickel asset, in Cote d’Ivoire, had also been earmarked for divestment within the next year.