More enhanced nickel exploration campaigns over greenfields provinces could push Western Australia's nickel production ranking from third place to first, according to Geological Survey of WA project leader Franco Pirajno.
The full text of a company announcement is pasted below
Western Australia has the potential to move its world ranking as a nickel producer from third largest to first, according to a geological survey specialist.
Addressing the second day in Perth today of the 2007 Paydirt Australian Nickel Conference, Dr Franco Pirajno, the Project Leader for the Geological Survey of Western Australia, said the climb to the top of global production rankings could be achieved by more enhanced nickel exploration campaigns over greenfields provinces.
These included the layered mafic-ultramafic intrusions and large igneous provinces of the Giles and Windimurra regions.
The State produced about 180,000 tonnes of nickel in calendar 2006 and is expected to boost that figure beyond 300,000 tonnes of nickel by the end of 2010, generating well over $5 billion in revenue.
Much of this output is from nickel laterite mineralisation contained in the broader Murrin Murrin, Ravensthorpe and Wingellina districts, and the sulphide deposits clustered around Kambalda, Mount Keith, Leinster and Forrestania.
Dr Pirajno said the untapped nickel potential of Western Australia lay in those under-explored areas where there was heavy erosion on large igneous provinces (LIP) - the geological structures established through the earth's natural release of magma types through oceanic and plate movements and volcanic uplifts.
In Western Australia, the largest of these is the newly named Marnda Moorn dyke swarms of the Yilgarn Craton - taking in much of the central and south western corner of Western Australia; to the north, selected areas of the Fortescue, Warakurna, and Kimberley Basins and to the east, two bounded areas in the Kalkarindji acreages.
