Norway-based Intex Resources ASA said it would spend as much as $2.9 billion to put up a high-pressure acid leach facility within the site of its Mindoro Nickel mine.
Intex president and CEO Erlend T. Grimstad said the company’s plant would be built in two stages: The first will process limonite ore and the second, the saprolite resource.
Grimstad said the capacity of the processing plant during the first stage would run up to about 40,000 tons of nickel and 3,000 tons of cobalt a year. At Stage 2, the facility would produce another 40,000 tons of nickel and an additional 700 tons of cobalt a year, he said.
The Mindoro mine, a nickel laterite deposit that may be one of the biggest in the world, covers 9,720 hectares of land straddling the border of the provinces of Oriental Mindoro and Occidental Mindoro. Most of the drilling work and evaluation were done initially in Kisluyan and Buraboy areas. Technical evaluation placed the current limonite resource at more than 100 million dry metric tons with 0.9 percent nickel and 0.07 percent cobalt.
