Conico expects to transform the economics at its Mt Thirsty project near Norseman in WA, by adding high-pressure acid leaching (HPAL) and a cathode precursor plant as part of an updated scoping study.
The HPAL will be adopted as part of metallurgical processing and the cathode precursor plant will be added to produce essential components for the manufacturing of high-performance lithium-ion batteries.
The company anticipates these additions will substantially improve project processing costs per tonne, metal recoveries, revenue and product value by at least 50 per cent. It also plans to reveal an updated mineral resource estimate for its 50 per cent-owned cobalt-nickel-manganese-scandium project ahead of an initial public offering (IPO) set to come later this year.
Conico expects its updated scoping study and associated project economics to be released by the middle of July. It believes the study will provide the foundation for the IPO in addition to a follow-up prefeasibility study (PFS).
The Mt Thirsty project is located 16km north of Norseman and has good access to existing transport and power infrastructure. Conico and Greenstone Resources each own 50 per cent of the project, which has a current JORC resource of 26.9 million tonnes at 0.126 per cent cobalt, 0.54 per cent nickel and 0.8 per cent manganese. Its initial PFS was completed in February, 2020.
Conico is planning to use fifth-generation high-pressure acid leaching to extract nickel, cobalt, manganese and scandium from its Mt Thirsty orebodies. The company said the process can now produce nickel at up to US$35,000 (AU$52,300) per tonne - a substantial improvement on the US$100,000 (AU$149,400) production costs per tonne of nickel from previous generations of HPAL plants.
The technology was refined rapidly, leading to the current advances, after Indonesia banned the export of unrefined nickel ores. The new plant design was developed using knowledge gained in six years by the Metallurgical Corporation of China at their Ramu nickel project in Papua New Guinea.
The HPAL process mixes oxide ore with sulfuric acid in an autoclave vessel and subjects them to high temperatures and pressures. The metals are dissolved separating them from the ore, allowing their extraction through a a series of chemical and physical processes. The processes separate and purify the individual metals.
Conico expects the adoption of high-pressure acid leaching at Mt Thirsty to materially improve cobalt and nickel recoveries, increasing revenues over the life of the mine. The previous PFS was based on using atmospheric leaching with metallurgical testing showing cobalt and nickel recoveries of just 74.3 per cent and 22.3 per cent respectively. Modern HPAL projects in Australia have much higher typical cobalt and nickel recoveries of 90.1 per cent and 92.3 per cent respectively.
Management believes scandium found in recent drilling at Mt Thirsty also has the potential to form a valuable by-product. It said HPAL testwork will assess the possibility of scandium recovery, but it did not yet have enough data to include the critical mineral in the updated resource estimate.
Conico believes the addition of a cathode precursor plant to produce a Precursor Cathode Active Material (pCAM) could increase pricing by 50 per cent over intermediatory products previously considered in the PFS. It says the Mt Thirsty project is uniquely-positioned because it contains all three of the principal constituents to produce the preferred 811 nickel-cobalt-manganese pCAM product (eight parts nickel, one part cobalt and one part manganese).
The company says pCAM is an essential precursor product for the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries.
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By Terry Bates
