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sIte VIsIt

WAK the white knight

among gold diggers

n a watershed year for resources IPOs process is ready to produce high quality Sorensen said upscaling kaolin pro-
Ion the ASX, WA Kaolin Ltd (WAK) pro- “ultra-bright” kaolin at significant scale. duction in Stage 1 to 200,000 tpa was a
duced an eye-catching float in November Using the K99 process, material “simple equation” and that construction
after raising $22 million. from Wickepin was initially tested via a activities were tracking well on site at
WAK’s arrival was very much against 250kg/h plant in Melbourne before scaled Wickepin.
the grain of predominantly gold-focused up operations shifted to Kwinana where The 25t/h plant at Wickepin will be
floats on the ASX last year, however, the the proof-of-concept plant is running at comprised of two 12.5t/h modules fixed
intention of delivering returns to investors 5t/h with capacity to produce 40,000 tpa less than 1km from the mine.
is on par with the rest of the class of 2020. kaolin as an around the clock operation. At the time of print, all long lead time
However, it is apparent that WAK is By the start of 2022, WAK aims to have items had been ordered, including the kiln
much closer to becoming a dividend achieved commercial scale operations of and an automated container loading sys-
payer than some of its new peers on the 25t/h and 200,000 tpa production capac- tem from Latvia.
bourse. ity. Of course, making all this possible has
As company co-founder and chief ex- “Since 2016 we have been operating been market support.
ecutive Andrew Sorensen explained to this new K99 process and by 2017 we “We went to the market to enable us
Paydirt on a recent site visit to the Wick- were really quite successful from a qual- to build the plant, which was budgeted
epin project, 220km south-east of Perth, ity point of view and market development. on a capex of $18 million, quite modest
WAK has been a story 20 years in the We really started hitting our straps and it in mining terms to build a plant. That is
making. was pretty apparent during 2018 that the due to the simplicity of the process. We
In 1999, after Rio Tinto Ltd had dis- demand was going to outpace our ability don’t need any tailings dams, there is no
covered and drilled a resource at Wick- to supply from our existing operations,” chemical processing; it is a pretty simple
epin, Alf Baker and the late Keith Snell ac- Sorensen said. processing set up,” Sorensen said.
quired the project, with Sorensen joining “Therefore, we set about how we would “We raised $22 million at IPO and we
the party thereafter. expand the business and what that ex- raised some money ahead of that, so we
While in private hands, a total of $42 pansion would look like; the directors of are fully funded to get this project up.”
million was invested in taking Wickepin to the company realised funding the expan- Kaolin is an emerging domain on the
a point at which WAK’s proprietary K99 sion via a listing was the way to go.” ASX. Sorensen said having the likes of

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