Capital Cost of Leach PlantEstimating this is a bit tricky because FPX awaruite concentrate will be really high grade.
In December of last year Terrafame let contracts to Outotec and JordProxa for a plant that will produce 170,000 tonnes of nickel sulfate, plus cobalt sulfate and some other products. The amount of raw nickel works out to about 37,500 TPA and the budgeted cost for the plant is 240M Euros, or $270M USD.
Baptiste would require far less leaching capacity because the grade is higher, but the crystallization capacity would need to be about the same intensity. For lack of a better option, I'm going to divide the CAPEX 50:50 between the two. Baptiste probably has 5X the grade and no need to capture other by-products.
The estimate becomes 1/5 X $135 M + 1 X $135M = $162 M / 37,500 TPA = $4,320 per tonne of annual nickel capacity.
Add this to the $25,000 from my previoys post, and we should be able to make nickel sulfate for an all in CAPEX of $29.3K per tonne of annual capacity.