The Spotted Quoll Nickel sulphide deposit is located at the Forrestania Nickel Operations, 400 km southeast of Perth. Spotted Quoll is located wholly within Mining Lease M77/583. The deposit is hosted within a sequence of sedimentary, ultramafic and mafic rocks within the Western Ultramafic Belt.

The sulphide mineralisation consists of massive to matrix sulphides located in a possible shear zone in metasedimentary rocks overlain by a package of ultramafic and mafic rocks. The deposit belongs to the Archean komatiite hosted nickel type.

Spotted Quoll rivals, and in cases, exceeds the nickel grades of Flying Fox, also making it one of the world’s highest grade nickel mines.

Production initially commenced from the Tim King open pit, which concluded as planned in February 2012 after producing around 27,000 tonnes of contained nickel.

The Spotted Quoll orebody is open at depth with the mine planned to just over 1km below the surface. The primary stoping method is a ‘top-down’ mining method using long-hole open stoping with paste fill. The narrower and shallower areas are mined using top-down narrow vein techniques also with paste fill with an average FY16 reserve grade of 3.6%. Based on current ore reserves, Spotted Quoll has a mine life exceeding 10 years.

The Cosmic Boy Concentrator treats raw nickel bearing ore from the Forrestania project to produce a consistent nickel concentrate product, grading approximately 14% nickel. Concentrate produced from the Forrestania project is characterised by low impurities such as magnesium which makes it more desirable to smelters. Current capacity allows for the treatment of 600,000 tonnes per annum of ore, with the potential to expand to 1,000,000 tonnes per annum.

The concentrator consists of a three stage crushing circuit, followed by a single closed circuit ball mill and a system of flotation tanks and thickening / filtration system.

Recovery rates for Cosmic Boy currently average between 85% and 90%. Recovery rates refer to the percentage amount of nickel recovered from the raw ore during processing. Rates achieved by Cosmic Boy are considered good by industry standards.