Jervois expects first cobalt ore through the mill at its Idaho Cobalt Operations (ICO) in October 2022 and full rate ore processing by February 2023.

The final forecast capital expenditure to bring ICO into production has been revised to US$107.5M (up 7.5% from the previous estimate).  The company notes cost pressures due to the US inflationary environment, contractor shortages, continued delays in the operability of an accommodation camp at site, and poor weather conditions across May and June. 

Jervois acquired the ICO cobalt-copper-gold mine project in mid-2019, and in September 2020 announced the completion of an updated BFS based on extracting 2.5Mtpy of ore at an average grade of 0.55% Co, 0.80% Cu and 0.64 g/t Au. The initial mine life set out in the BFS is seven years and CAPEX is put at US$78.4M.  Once in production, ICO may be the only cobalt mine in the USA (although Lundin's Eagle mine has potential for Co by-product credits).  Jervois noted last week that it had committed an additional US$3.6M to ICO drilling and will use results from the drilling to update its ICO resource model in Q4 2022

Jervois is advancing towards being a leading global supplier of responsibly sourced cobalt and nickel.  The company bought Freeport Cobalt for US$160M in 2021.  In doing so it acquired around 40% of the capacity of the Kokkola refinery in Finland, after certain refining and battery material production lines were acquired by Umicore in 2019. 

It also bought the São Miguel Paulista (SMP) nickel refinery in Brazil for US$22.5M in 2020 and published a BFS in April this year which envisages stage one production of 10ktpy Ni cathode and 2ktpy Co metal cathode with stage two ramping up to 25ktpy Ni.  Total CAPEX is put at US$55M.