Poseidon Nickel plans to extend initial mine life estimations for the Black Swan project in Western Australia after making significant progress with its ‘fill the mill’ strategy.
The company has been growing its mining inventory at Black Swan, which has recently been complemented by the addition of a 6300-tonne Golden Swan discovery to the project’s resource portfolio.
Poseidon has begun resource drilling at Silver Swan as it looks to upgrade inferred resources to indicated resources and commenced drilling of its Black Swan disseminated orebody to explore improved serpentinite ore quantities and grades.
The company hopes the Black Swan project will extend beyond five years following its restart.
“Since announcing our ‘fill the mill’ strategy in July 2021, the company has made considerable progress on workstreams progressing our Black Swan project towards a restart, targeting late 2022 plant commissioning,” Poseidon managing director and chief executive officer Peter Harold said.
Progress has also been made at Poseidon’s Silver Swan processing circuit, which will assist in improving the concentrate quality at Black Swan.
“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-tonnes-per-annum (Mtpa) concentrator, derated to 1.1Mtpa,” Harold continued.
Poseidon initially released a Black Swan scoping study in July 2018, which was denied for development due to a deteriorating nickel market following the release of the study.
The company has been working to further de-risk the project since then, whereby growing the mineral resource has been a principal strategy.
In July 2021, GR Engineering Services completed a scoping study on Black Swan, which suggested maximising the nickel tonnes produced would be the best way forward for the project.
This comes partly as a result of the strengthening spot nickel price, averaging close to $US9 ($12.26)/pound, and a positive outlook for offtake markets.
Poseidon is currently completing a bankable feasibility study for Black Swan.