Widgie Nickel Unveils Discovery, Lodges Mining Proposal
THE CONFERENCE CALLER: Well-placed Widgie Nickel (ASX: WIN) has outlined progress towards lithium mining plus a nickel discovery at the company’s flagship Mt Edwards project, ahead of today’s presentation to the 2023 RIU Sydney Resources Round-up.
“It’s very much a multi-dimensional story,” managing director and CEO Steve Norregaard told Resources Roadhouse on the sidelines.
The company is also in a very active corporate space. Its nickel assets are proximal to producer and takeover target Mincor Resources, while its Faraday lithium deposit is proximal to Essential Metals, which recently rejected a bid by Tianqi Lithium Energy Australia and welcomed Mineral Resources as a major shareholder.
On the lithium front, Widgie lodged a mining proposal on Monday for its Faraday direct shipping ore lithium operation, at Mt Edwards in Western Australia.
Norregaard said the company was making rapid progress, given only six months had passed since announcing finding rock chips with lithium and two months since releasing a maiden lithium resource.
“Now we’ve started the process of permitting for a starter pit … which is a big achievement and very much geared towards the fact that the demand for potential DSO products is probably going to be short-lived because we can see there’s many, many companies looking for lithium, there’s some very, very big deposits,” he said.
“We’re fortunate that Faraday occurs on a granted mining tenement so we have very, very little challenges in order to be able to bring this product to market, so I’m supremely optimistic that our starter pit will be approved ready for extraction, prior to the end of this financial year.”
He said lodging the mining proposal also gave confidence to potential lithium offtake partners.
Separately, the company – which floated on its nickel endowment – announced a nickel discovery south of its Gillett Resource, underpinning the growth potential in the Widgie South area at Mt Edwards.
Results included 30m at 1.17 per cent nickel, 0.14 per cent copper, 0.03 per cent cobalt, 0.04 grams per tonne gold, 0.11g/t palladium and 0.09g/t platinum from 214m.
“What we do find really exciting is that we were previously led to believe that Gillett was cut off to the south,” Norregaard said.
He said the Widgie South scoping study was underway and he was “supremely confident” they’d be in a strong position to understand the value Gillett South represented to the company by year-end.
Widgie was also in “the final throes” of a feasibility study on its advanced Armstrong nickel deposit, expected to be development-ready in late 2023.
The overall Mt Edwards project currently contains more than 168,000 tonnes of nickel across 12 deposits.