The anouncement has not been made but there is an update to the Chinese visit as announced in Mining News previously, instead of March/April, the Chinese have apparently accepted to return in "early May".
You can fnd this out by writing or calling the company.
Here's a technical update on the Young Resource. It does seem like time is of the essence here in order to capitalise on Nickel prices. Lets hope Chip Goodyear is right in saying that high metal prices will endure for at least 10 years.
Jervois hopeful for laterite success
Thursday, 22 March 2007
Kate Haycock
ON THE back of nickel's recent record highs, New South Wales-focused junior Jervois Mining announced yesterday that after considering a range of processing options for its nickel project in Young, its major focus would now be proving that chlorine leach processing can be used successfully with the nickel-cobalt laterite ore from the project.
The company said it had carried out test work for nickel and cobalt recovery using three different processes – high pressure acid leach, atmospheric pressure acid leach, and atmospheric chloride leach.
While high pressure acid leach had higher recovery rates of 93% for nickel and 97% for cobalt, compared to rates from 70-92% for nickel and 85-94% for copper with chlorine leach, the company has flagged the former as its preferred method.
Jervois company director and exploration geologist Anthony Jannink told MiningNews.Net that Jervois was focusing on the chloride leach processing for the ore from the 167 million tonne nickel and cobalt laterite resource at Young because it was the most economic.
"High pressure acid leach is a process that Murrin Murrin uses and Cawse and Bulong both tried to use," Jannink said.
"It is a very expensive system, even though it has a good recovery rate. Because the nickel price is so huge right now the process is economic. [But] if the nickel price comes back down to a normal price as it was two years ago, that process would close down as well.
"Chlorine leach is much less expensive, it doesn't have these very high temperatures or very high pressures that the high pressure leach has. Chloride is a strong acid as well but at least you're not boiling it up to high temperatures and under high pressures."
Jannink also said that a third method, atmospheric pressure acid leach, was not suitable for the geology at the Young deposit.
"Atmospheric pressure leach works well on the lowered horizons – saprolite and weather serpentinite, it's pretty hopeless on hematite and limonite. We just don't get much recovery from those. [At Young] we have to mine the hematite and limonite to get to the saprolite, so we wanted something that we could use on the hematite first."
Jervois was not the only company investigating chlorine leach processing for nickel laterite deposits, Jannink said.
"The big boys are looking at chlorine leach processes, the BHPs and the Mincos and so forth. But I think we're more advanced than we are – they're watching eagerly what we're doing."
Despite the fact that nickel laterite has proven a difficult substance to mine efficiently, Jannink said the company was very hopeful about the project's future.
"We know we can do this on the laboratory scale and we're about to start a larger scale trial … and we're getting an independent laboratory to do some bigger scale testing for us.
"Next month in April we've [also] got a major drilling program at Young, which will both help to prove up the deposit and produce a lot of samples, say five to 10 tonnes, which will go into bigger scale testing. We should have samples ready by June," he said.
"The main task is to get this thing to work."
Additionally, Jervois announced yesterday that it had commissioned a report into viability of a low-grade ferro-nickel production at Young.