Atmospheric Leaching

Skye’s novel atmospheric leach process offers significant advantages over commercialized high pressure leach processes as a result of its ability to treat both the limonite and saprolite horizons of nickel laterite ore bodies and the relatively simple equipment used in the flow sheet, which is expected to lead to lower capital and maintenance costs and greater plant availability. While the Skye leaching process is novel, the downstream recovery processes are already well proven. The product of the atmospheric leaching process would be either mixed nickel/cobalt hydroxides (MHP) or mixed nickel/cobalt sulphides (MSP).

The Skye atmospheric leaching process has been developed at bench-scale and was tested extensively in a pilot plant at SGS Lakefield. The final pilot plant report has been received, and it is expected that the next step in the development would be a continuous, integrated demonstration plant that would be constructed and operated for a sustainable period of time. The demonstration plant would provide final validation of the atmospheric leach process chemistry, equipment choices made for the process and generate the engineering information needed to design the commercial plant equipment.