Wieder "10.000" Rule,
also Häppchen-mässig jetzt:
" ....................Someone listening to this might say, "Well, this thing looks so good. How come it wasn't done years ago?" The previous owners of the technology, a company called Direct Nickel, acquired by Altilium Group, tried to commercialize this process about 10 years ago. But at the time, the only real market for nickel was stainless steel and alloys. And that time, 10 or 15 years ago, coincided with the boom in nickel pig iron production. Nickel pig iron was the cheapest way of getting nickel units into stainless steel. And it still is today. It has a horrible environmental footprint, but it's still the cheapest way of getting nickel metal into stainless steel.
The battery nickel sulfate market did not exist 10 - 15 years ago. So, Direct Nickel was attempting to commercialize a wonderful technology at a terrible time. In contrast, we're fortunate to be commercializing this technology at the perfect time. There is a market, a huge and growing market for battery grade nickel (especially nickel sulfate). It is projected, even by the pessimists, to be at least an additional one million tons of nickel by the end of the decade, for the lithium-ion battery industry. And the products from the DNi Process™ go straight into cathode active material manufacturing. So that's perfect timing.
The other thing that's important is, (I know it's not logical), but people don't care where the nickel comes from for their kitchen sink, but they do care where their nickel comes from for their electric vehicle. So, the sustainability credentials of this process are very, very important, particularly for North Asia, North America and the European Union, where people care about tailings, deforestation, ocean effluents, greenhouse gas intensity, child labour, etc. So, as I said in one forum, nobody wants to get into their electric VW in Frankfurt and know that the 50 kilograms or 100 kilograms of nickel, sitting in their battery pack, is responsible for 5 or 10 tons of tailings dumped in the ocean, which is what is practiced by one of the large nickel producers. Or they don't want to know that there's been a massive greenhouse gas footprint in the production of that material or deforestation, or damage to oceans, et cetera.
So the timing is right. There's a huge and growing market for battery-grade nickel. And the sustainability footprint of that production is very, very important. At Queensland Pacific Metals, we are bringing that all together at the right time.
Dr. Allen Alper: Well, that sounds excellent. Could you tell our readers/investors a little bit about the partners you're working with?
Dr. Stephen Grocott: Yes. Firstly, the owners of the technology are a group called Altilium Group and we have a royalty-based license, from them, to produce nickel and cobalt sulfate. The other partner that we have is Hatch, for the Definitive Feasibility Study, which is well underway now. Hatch has a fantastic global reputation as an EPCM partner. We chose them, from a number of other companies, because they're high-quality and their reputation is important to them. They have very good experience in nickel and base metal hydrometallurgy. So those are our two key partners.
We're also partnering, with a local government. Our project is to be located just south of Townsville, in North Coast Queensland. The government there established a heavy industry-zoned precinct, called the Lansdown Eco-Industrial Precinct. It's a fantastic location. On the Eastern boundary of our construction site, there is a rail line, a highway, a gas pipeline, a few kilometers away there is a water pipeline and there is power, and that includes a solar PV power facility, being built nearby. So it has all of the infrastructure. As they say, “location, location, location”, and we couldn't ask for a better location.
[Blockierte Grafik: http://www.metalsnews.com/catalog/items/1368423/004.jpg]
We're also partnering, with some mining companies in New Caledonia, which is one of the two highest grade producers of lateritic nickel ores in the world. The other one being Indonesia, but Indonesia has an ore export ban. New Caledonia is just a few days sailing from Townsville and those mines have been in existence for many decades. They have hundreds of years of resource and we'll be partnering with them to import ore into Townsville, to process in our plant. They have exported to Townsville, for a number of decades, to a now shut down nickel facility. It was the Queensland Nickel Refinery. It used a very old, very greenhouse gas and tailings intensive process that shut down a few years ago. So we're partnering with the same mining companies to process the ore through the Direct Nickel Process™.
We're also working with the national government, the Commonwealth Government of Australia and investigating government funding opportunities. But I guess the biggest partners that we have are LG Energy Solution and POSCO. We have signed binding offtake agreements for about 65% of our production to supply POSCO and LG. We started discussions with them, nearly a year ago, and we went through a non-binding MOU, then lots of due diligence on their part. And they put us through the grill. They're very professional organizations, fantastic companies, as your readers probably know, LG Energy Solution is the world's largest manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries. So, they're the number one and it's a pleasure to work with companies like that.
[Blockierte Grafik: http://www.metalsnews.com/catalog/items/1368423/005.jpg]
Dr. Allen Alper: That sounds excellent. Could you tell our readers/investors, a little bit more about the schedule of moving your project?
Dr. Stephen Grocott: Certainly. When we first started discussing, with LG and Posco and others (by the way, we also have a non-binding MOU with Samsung, a number four or five battery producer), they said to us, "Can you build this bigger? And can you build it faster?" And we said, "Yes, we can certainly build it bigger." Our previous planned nickel production capacity was 6,000 nickel tons a year. And we said, we've only made it that size because it's the smallest production unit we can build and still be economical. We were a small company and the funding was the challenge. So they said, "Can you do it bigger?" We said, "Absolutely. If you have skin in the game, we can." So now the production size will be about 16,000 nickel tons a year.
They also said, "Can you do it faster?" And we said, "Yes, we can do it faster, but it will cost more money, to do the feasibility study." When you accelerate feasibility studies, sometimes that means you have to circle back and re-optimize parts of the engineering. That sometimes adds to the costs. So, we said, "We can go faster, but again, you’d need to have skin in the game."
So, we raised 20 million Australian dollars. LG and POSCO injected 15 million US, converted, that's similar. And we now have an accelerated schedule for our feasibility study. The feasibility study, which is well underway, will be complete about February 2022 and that will deliver the capital estimate and operating cost estimate. In parallel with the feasibility study, we have approvals underway, which are relatively straightforward, because it's such a clean, green process, in a zoned-heavy industrial land, which is a former, cattle grazing research station. The approvals should be complete, by the end of this calendar year.
[Blockierte Grafik: http://www.metalsnews.com/catalog/items/1368423/006.jpg]
We're also paralleling the feasibility study, with some detailed engineering and early procurement activities, so that we have a fast construction schedule. Funding is underway in parallel. We aim for a final investment decision by the middle of next year. Before then, we will probably still be placing orders for long lead time items. Total construction time is about 18 months. And we'll be commissioning the plant for first production by the end of 2023.
[Blockierte Grafik: http://www.metalsnews.com/catalog/items/1368423/007.jpg]
So, that's quite a fast schedule, and people say, "Well, how on Earth can you do something like that so quickly?" Part of the reason is that the approvals are so straightforward, it's such a clean, green process, and we have no mine to develop. Often that is one of the slow parts, getting the approvals for the mine development, but we have no mine to develop. Our equipment is relatively simple. High pressure acid leaching, for nickel production, has very large, high temperature, high pressure autoclaves, very long lead time items. All of our leaching and nickel/cobalt production steps are at atmospheric pressure, simple vessels, relatively straightforward, steel alloys. So it's actually a relatively fast construction. First production, by the end of 2023................................................"