Lake johnson

The Lake Johnston Nickel Project is located 117 kilometres west of Norseman and 440 kilometres east of Perth, in Western Australia. Access to the project site is via unsealed tracks off the Norseman ñ Hyden Road.

Lake Johnston Project now Operated by Poseidon Nickel Limited

The Lake Johnston Project is operated by nickel sulphide mine development company, Poseidon Nickel Limited, an Australian ASX listed company with its headquarters in Perth. Poseidon Nickel acquired the Lake Johnston Project from Russian mining company, Norilsk Nickel, in 2014. The acquisition included the Maggie Hays underground nickel mine and the 1.5 million tonnes a year Emily Anne concentrator facility, the Emily Anne underground mine having ceased production of its own in 2007. Both the Maggie Hays mine and the ore processing plant had been placed on a care and maintenance status by the previous owner, Norilsk Nickel, in April, 2013. Norilsk Nickel had purchased the Lake Johnston Project from Lionore Mining International in 2007 and had recommenced production of its own in 2011.

The Lake Johnston Project contains an estimated resource of 70,500 tonnes of nickel which increased Poseidon's total nickel holdings in Australia to more than 400,000 tonnes. The Lake Johnston project itself had been producing more than 12,000 tonnes of good quality smeltable nickel concentrate a year before it was placed on care and maintenance.

Lake Johnston Project has Further Exploration Potential

Lake Johnston is a near term production project that has high potential mine life extension exploration targets leading from the Maggie Hays deposit that are to be followed up by Poseidon. The project has been operated in the past as a fly-in-fly-out mining operation as the mine has its own unsealed air strip near the project site.

Lake Johnston Project Acquired With all Necessary Infrastructure

The project's Emily Anne processing facility consists of a conventional nickel sulphide flotation plant which has produced concentrate with a low arsenic level and around 13.5 percent smeltable quality nickel. The plant was substantially refurbished in 2011. Other infrastructure acquired by Poseidon include tailings storage facilities that cover an area of around 42 hectares, the Windy Hill 140 person accommodation village, workshops and offices, as well as other support facilities, such as site access and haulage roads, a crushing, screening and grinding facility, weighbridge and concentrate storage shed, concrete plant and storage, a fill plant, a five MW generator power station, a potable waterbore network that includes discharge and settling ponds, three water producing bores, two rising mains to lift water from underground sumps, a sewerage treatment plant with evaporative ponds and reverse osmosis plants.

The Lake Johnston Project commenced operations in 2001 and underwent considerable expansion in 2003 that allowed it to increase production from its original 250,000 tonnes to 1.2 million tonnes annually. The ore from the Maggie Hays underground operation is taken three kilometres to be processed at the Emily Anne plant. Lake Johnston tenements cover an area of 1,200 square kilometres.