ZERO cash costs Citigroup predicts nickel will resume its upward trajectory and could top $13/lb. in 2015.
Like most platinum and palladium bearing deposits, the Wellgreen project also contains a significant abundance of nickel, as well as a lesser amount of copper and cobalt.
“It is not often to see such a confluence of events on both the supply and demand side impact on a mining project in such dramatic fashion,” said Johnson, who has over 25 years of experience in the exploration and development of large scale mining projects in Alaska, Canada, Africa, Australia and Russia.
Even copper has seen gains, recently touching a two month high on renewed hopes for accelerating Chinese growth.
“What’s happening now around the world has propelled our vision of developing Wellgreen into a significant global platinum group metals producer with significant credits from nickel and other base metals potentially covering all the mining costs. That means we potentially could have a zero cash cost to produce an ounce of platinum or palladium net of credits or as a co-product PGM-nickel producer would likely be in the lowest quartile of producer costs.” Johnson added.
“Even though we anticipate that platinum and palladium will to be our largest component of operating cash flow, we have significant leverage to nickel prices with each $1/lb increase in nickel price providing an estimated additional $50 million to the bottom line annually.”