How do development, production, grade, recovery, and commodity-price assumptions shape the mine plan?
Model profile
Nickel Small-Scale Mining
An artisanal and small-scale nickel mining enterprise or cooperative, set up for Zambia or for a country you choose, hand-sorting hard-rock sulphide ore and selling it as feed to a concentrator, or laterite to an exporter or an aggregation hub. Built from the Zambia-nickel ASMEs workbook, which it reproduces as a preset, and tested the way a buyer and a lender would: the product's grade and moisture, what the buyer actually pays, the haul, the rains, and debt sized on the cash the mine can service.
Decision scope
Questions this model helps you examine
What capital, operating cost, closure provision, and financing structure are required?
How do price, grade, recovery, cost, and schedule downside cases affect investment returns?
Model capabilities
What this model includes
The profile below is generated from the same catalogue and workspace definitions used by the application.
- Run-of-mine ore to a hand-sorted product: mass yield, grade, recovery and moisture
- The buyer pays on a share of LME, as concentrator feed on recovered nickel, or on a grade-price grid
- Logistics by route segment, per wet tonne-kilometre, with border and port charges
- A resource limit, an exploration and bulk-sampling stage, and the November to March rains
- Drilling and blasting, diesel by the tonne, and labour sized from productivity
- A country profile: currency, tax and royalty, payroll, country risk, licence rules and season
- Local-currency costs with pass-through, and a local-currency or dollar loan
- Debt sized and sculpted on cash available for debt service, with a reserve, a lease and an offtaker prepayment
- Break-even payability and haul distance, and a lender scorecard
- Zambian royalty, tax regime, Environmental Protection Fund and VAT options
- A price deck, named scenarios, an NPV tornado and a Monte Carlo
Build the case
Inputs and workspaces
- CasesLoad the concentrator, selective-mining, laterite or workbook case
- Mine and costsCountry, licence type and term, geology and resource, capacity, the LME price, unit costs, diesel and the local currency
- Mine planCapacity, utilisation, strip ratio, grade, recovery, price and payability by year
- SeasonalityHow the rains spread production across the months
- Product and buyerMass yield, moisture, how the buyer pays, settlement and an outage
- Price grid and routeGrade-price bands, deleterious-element penalties, a sliding-scale royalty and the route to the buyer
- Staff and operating costsPositions, pay, start dates, sizing from productivity, and other operating expenses
- Initial costs and assetsStart-up costs, the four asset classes, replacement and the lease share
- FinancingEquity, the start-up gap, the term loan and its sizing, the reserve, the lease and the prepayment
- Fiscal and permitsTax regime, royalty, levies, the Environmental Protection Fund and VAT
- Valuation and riskCost of capital, closure, the price deck and the Monte Carlo
- Due diligenceLicence, environment, offtake, resource, responsible sourcing, safety and community
Review the result
Outputs and analysis
- Project NPVUSD, at WACC
- Project IRRUnlevered, after tax
- WACCDiscount rate
- PaybackMonths
- Minimum DSCRYears principal is repaid
- Loan life cover ratioAt first repayment
- Term loanSized by the model
- Total fundingAll sources
- 17 additional metrics in the workspace
- Financial statementsDetailed schedules
- Lender view, mine plan, funding & valuationDetailed schedules
- Risk & analyticsDetailed schedules
Designed for review
Who this model is for
- Mine owners and project sponsors
- Technical and operating teams
- Financial advisers
- Investors and lenders
Governed evidence
The review trail stays with the result.
Each completed calculation preserves the model version, saved inputs, reporting-currency snapshot, immutable run, and result fingerprint used for its reports.
- Version-controlled calculation logic
- Saved assumptions and scenarios
- Immutable calculation runs
- Reporting context preserved in exports
Ready to explore the case?