Minerals: laterite nickel
Instrumental technique: ICP OES, ICP OES, FRX, AAS, AFS
Hi Elizabet,
Greetings to Cuba from Afghanistan. I have never been to Cuba. I cannot answer your question directly. However I can supply some information about Cuban laterites that you might not be fully aware of.
When in Aktobe Oblast in Kazakhstan some years ago, my team helped the Nicktau ("nickel town") mines to restart. The Ni-Co ores were called "nickel silicates". On inspection we noted that they were nickel-cobalt laterites. Unlike many modern laterites the prevailing climate is cool/cold continental, and therefore no tropical forest, only steppe. Therefore the Soviet geologists were unaware of how they might have formed. We figured out that the "nickel silicates" were indeed Ni-Co laterites in ancient paleosols that formed when northern Kazakhstan was further south in a humid tropical climate (Cret-Tert??) on what is now a stable relict topography.
Trainloads of Ni-Co silicates (= laterites) were shipped at the Kazakh railway-Russian railway interchange at Nictau northwards to a special Ni-Co laterite factory in or near Orenburg a short distance inside Russia. I never got to see the processing factory, but clearly it was built long-before western HPAL factories.
About Cuba...
I was informed by several reliable sources that in the past the Orenburg processing factory had also processed a lot of "Nickel Silicates" from Cuba.
About analytical tests for Ni-Co laterites...
The very extensive Ni-Co silicate mines at Nictau (Kazakhstan) had good labs and geochemists dedicated to routine analyses.
I was also told that the Orenburg factory has a similar Ni-Co silicate testing facility.
About analytical test results for Ni-Co laterites...
1: CUBA results will be in the archives of the Orenburg factory, and held in Moscow I assume.
2: NICTAU results are in the archives of the Nictau Mines and much of the data is in public domain in the Kazakhstan geo reports (can be bought).
More information...
Confidential data on Nictau Mines is held in Aktyubinsk (=Aktobe) by the SMEDA unit of the Aktobe Oblast Administration.
Elizabet... For the determination of major,minor and trace elements in laterite nickel ore,many kinds of measurement methods for a given element and many differences of details between detection methods based on the same principle are available,making it difficult to select the appropriate method.
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