Yesterday Noront said they are considering 4 Northern Ontario locations for it's chromite Refinery including Sudbury, Timmins, Sault Ste Marie and Thunder BAy.

Noront plans to mine and mill the ore at the ROF and produce a concentrate that will be shipped by road or rail to a smelter.

They also announced that their concentrate from ROF will be shipped to Sudbury for Smelting before it goes to the Chromite Refinery.

Vale (INCO) closed a smelter in Coniston, a Sudbury suburb, in the 1960's. If (when) Sudbury is chosen as the location for the Chromite Refinery it will be on the site of the old Coniston Smelter.

Alan coutts, Noront Preident, made the following statement...

"how efficiently we can move materials to and from the smelter," he said. "And where is the smelter -- how close is it to the Ring? How close is it to markets?"

It is highly unlikely that Noront would ship concentrate to Sudbury for Smelting and then ship the smelted material out of Sudbury when they could simply refine it in Coniston, a distance of 5-10 km.


Coutts also made the following statement....

There is already more nickel being used than created, and that market "is set to go into bigger deficits because of the need for nickel in electrical vehicle batteries," he said. "There's a massive need for nickel going forward, so we're expecting to have very robust nickel prices."

This demand means that Vale and Glencore will be looking for lots of feed for existing operations in Sudbury. There is a shortage of new mines around Sudbury and some mines have been closed due to age and were running out of ore.

 

New Age Metals (NAM) has a PGE, Copper, Nickel, Gold deposit within 100km of Sudbury with a 2012 43-101 resource estimate of 3.9M OZ Palladium equivalent at $1000 per OZ Palladium.

 

By comparison to the ROF, NAM would simply ship raw ore, likely by road,  to Sudbury, without milling, to an existing mill in Sudbury. A subsidiary of Glencore is currently updating the a metallurgical study done by SGS. A footwall discovery by NAM in 2017 found mineralization starting at 4 meters. Extensive drilling since the 2012 RE will be included in the new 43-101 report scheduled for Q1 2018.