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are only a handful of regions where you
wayside, while Target 1 gets developed.
A downcycle might then be encountered
and the projects get forgotten about, so I
think there is a lot of potential still at Ne- to make such discoveries, according to
pean; it has been a long time since we
have seen a nickel cycle.” “We are starting to get a lot of interest
No matter the prevailing winds of a
nickel market, a genuine nickel sulphide
can get that. In terms of our competitors,
having that base high-grade mineralisa-
tion on all three projects is our competi-
tive advantage,” Platel said.
“We have awesome blue-sky with
the greenfields targets plus something
tangible resource-wise to start with and
we want to push that home. That is why
we are looking at possible fast-tracking
into production and why we are looking
at producing JORC 2012 compliant re-
sources.”
Auroch’s mission is to grow to 100,000t
JORC 2012 compliant resources in the
next 12 months, according to Platel.
Infill drilling at Saints to take resources
to an indicated level or better is part of
the drilling schedule that will be roughly
split 60:40 exploration to resource work.
An upgraded Saints resource will es-
sentially backbone scoping studies.
At the time of print, diamond drilling
was set to test the high-priority aero-
magnetic anomalies along strike from
the Horn prospect at the Leinster nickel
project where significant intercepts of 7m
@ 2.58% nickel from 158.6m and 7.3m
@ 2.2%.
“The mission of 100,000t of contained
nickel in resource is really where we want
to be and with the ground we have got,
we can certainly get that in the next 12
months. We are sitting on a significant
amount of nickel already, albeit not all
JORC [2012]-compliant, and with room
to grow those resources; we can make
them as big as possible but obviously to
get to 100,000t we need a new discov-
ery,” Platel said.
“Rule of thumb in industry is a new
standalone nickel discovery is around
30,000-50,000t contained nickel, so ef-
find is roundly welcome and bar patches
of Tanzania and Canada, WA’s Norse- fectively we are saying that we need to
man-Wiluna greenstone belt is the place make one or two discoveries this year,
and on the ground that we have got that
Platel. is very possible.”
Auroch’s ideal nickel sulphide project
from the UK and US markets because has an existing mine gate resource, ob-
they all want exposure to nickel and there vious brownfields extensions to it and
blue-sky greenfields potential all close
to infrastructure, preferably in the Norse-
man-Wiluna belt.
“Those are the basic criteria we are
looking for,” Platel said.
“We needed that third project [Nepean]
to be able to have that next target worked
up and ready to go. With two projects you
can struggle to keep up the momentum
because you have to wait for results to
model up the next drill targets. Now with
three projects and a much bigger land
holding we have got that ability to keep
going around.”
– Mark Andrews
aUSTRaLIa’S PaYDIRT aPRIL 2021 Page 17