Brazilian Nickel Ltd
Brazilian
brilliance
Brazilian
brilliance Written by Dale Benton Produced by Jack Pascall
Brazilian Nickel Ltd
The Piaui Nickel Project in Brazil looks to change the nickel industry: Brazilian Nickel talks about revolutionising the nickel industry by building a strong legacy in Piaui
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he relationship between a mining company and the local community or economy in which it operates is not something that should be taken for granted. For a company like Brazilian Nickel, enhancing, protecting and developing a sustainable future for the local community in Piauí is one of the most important aims of the business, second only to shaping the future of the nickel industry. Brazilian Nickel formed in 2013 and began to develop the flagship Piauí Nickel Project, in the North Eastern Piauí state of Brazil. Over the last three years the company has fully integrated itself into the surrounding community, providing jobs, training and opportunities. “We want to be a local company, a
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Brazilian company,” says Mike Oxley, Managing Director of Brazilian Nickel. “We’ve made a real effort to try and balance employment from different towns and villages in our area so that we don’t just concentrate on one or another to truly maximise the benefit of a local network,” he says. For a UK company, heading into a foreign state can prove difficult for many reasons, not least that it can be met with detractors and dismissed as merely another ‘foreign company’ disrupting the local environment. This is crucial to the success of the company and achieving the vision for the future. “This is the poorest state in Brazil and so we want to bring opportunities and jobs and wealth to this part of the country,” says Anne Oxley, Brazilian
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Nickel’s Technical Director. “As a company we can empower the local people and build their capacities.” Luciano Ramos, Chief Operating Officer at Brazilian Nickel, is a native Brazilian with a wealth of experience in mining organisations worldwide. Locals in the state of Piauí are not wealthy and job opportunities are slim, but Ramos believes that through training opportunities, Brazilian Nickel can prepare locals “not just for Brazil, but for the world.” Through the Piauí Nickel Project the company aims to create a competitive advantage in the heap leaching of Nickel laterite. Heap leaching is a process of extracting valuable metals from ores through dissolving the metals in solvent. It is a low cost process which naturally brings huge capital cost savings and a competitive edge over other nickel laterite operators. Local business, local suppliers One way in which the company aims to grow and achieve success as a business while maintaining that local Brazilian foundation is
through working with local suppliers. Brazilian Nickel works to establish a mutual benefit for both the company and the local partner. “As a company we realised that local suppliers deliver to high standards but may lack in experience. This is where BRN comes in; we embed sustainability into what we plan to do in the area by creating and training a group of local companies who can then work to world class standards,” says Mike Oxley. For any mining operation, choosing the location in which to create and develop a project takes time and consideration in order to fully realise the potential in the business. This process saw him look at over 118 different locations in which the technology could be applicable, including Russia, Indonesia, Turkey and North America before settling on Brazil. “Brazil has a strong mining culture. The people here understand mining and the benefits that it can bring to the economy as well as what it can bring for the ordinary person in terms of the metals we
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use in our technology,” he says. there is a huge melting pot of them Brazil has a strong and clear in Brazil. Of course you can use legislative path which Brazilian Nickel expats but for me it is better if you will follow in order to obtain all the can take your skilled people from required licences for operation. The the country you’re working in.” company in fact has received a great level of support from the state of Booming Brazil in 2016 Piauí and the state capital Teresina, 2016 has been a strong year for it has assisted in this process Brazilian Nickel as the company to allow BRN to both produced its very first understand and operate saleable nickel product within the regulatory from the Piaui project requirements. demonstration plant, Looking at the using low strength choice of location acid lixiviant on Number of employees from a technical the heaps to gain at Brazilian Nickel perspective, Brazil a PLS high in value has a very rich technical metals. From this we base with multiple create a product that technical universities to Oxley believes is the “right support the country’s mining culture. product” to take to the nickel market. “As a technology company as The company recently completed a well as a mining company, the pre-feasibility study at the site which skills needed to operate are at a determined that at full operation the high level,” says Anne Oxley. project will produce around 24,500 “Engineers, metallurgists, process tonnes of nickel per year contained engineers, electrical engineers in an intermediate product. are all needed for this project and Despite this, Oxley is keen to bring
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the project into production earlier and BRN looks to head into production in early 2018 at a much smaller scale at around 1,000 tonnes per year. “In many respects, by taking things in bitesize chunks it means we can bring our people and team with us. We have time to develop them and in today’s capital markets, we are aware that it’s not easy and it’s not been easy for a number of years,” he says. “We feel we have achieved and been different from many other companies in that we have made real progress against very strong headwinds. We expect to keep on being able to do that but we’re not trying to leap and run, we’re making sure we are within our capabilities on each of our steps.” Breaking out into the world Brazilian Nickel prides itself on its local suppliers and local roots but it does not underestimate the importance of international partners. The nickel industry, despite being global, is in fact relatively small due to the fact there is not a large number of companies producing the metal. “It does get larger the further downstream you go of course,” says Oxley. “It’s a small industry with nowhere to hide, so It is important for us to build a solid reputation and highlight that as we position ourselves as a low cost producer of nickel we are a professional and ethical company that can bring relatively high shareholder value.”
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Beyond the project, Brazilian Nickel is committed to sustainability. Mine closures are commonplace across the industry and this is something that must be brought to the table of discussion when planning ahead. A legacy of empowerment Brazilian Nickel incorporates the idea of a positive legacy into its strategy. As with its commitment to creating opportunities and growth within the local community, the company is committed to a legacy of change as evidenced by the work with growing local supplier businesses. “Sustainable mining could be regarded as something of an oxymoron,” says Oxley. “Mines by their very nature at some point will run out, regardless of how long their mine life might be.” “Once upon a time a mine would close and that would pretty much be the end of that
town,” says Anne Oxley. “If you start at the beginning of the process with a view to create a legacy that can survive the mine, there are things you can do. Businesses will grow and survive, communities will grow with them.” The company, in producing the first saleable nickel product, has surpassed its technical expectations and achieved its success on time, on quality and most importantly on budget. This has allowed the company to think beyond the Piauí Nickel Project, with testing currently underway on an improved nickel product with the use of ion exchange and plans to one day expand across wider Brazil and worldwide. “We are looking at other opportunities of course but right now it’s important not to lose focus on what’s important to the company, which is to get the Piauí project into production,” Mike Oxley concludes.
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“We’ve made a real effort to try and balance employment from different towns and villages in our area so that we don’t just concentrate on one or another to truly maximise the benefit of a local network”
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Brazilian Nickel Ltd 10 Lonsdale Gardens Tunbridge Wells, Kent, UK TN1 1NU info@brnickel.com www.brnickel.com