Bulong Nickel Mine
nickel mine in Western Australia
Bulong Nickel Mine was a surface nickel and cobalt mine near Bulong, Western Australia, 40 kilometres (25 mi) east of Kalgoorlie, adjacent to Lake Yindarlgooda.
The mine operated for only four years and was a financial failure. Despite its short operation period, it left a legacy of environmental pollution. Additionally, the mine used up to 500 kilograms (1,100 lb) of sulphuric acid per tonne of ore to remove impurities in the ore.
History
The area around Bulong originally was a gold mining location, with gold being discovered there in 1893 and mined until 1908. The nickel and cobalt laterite deposit at Bulong were discovered by the exploration department of WMC Resources in 1978 but not considered viable to be mined. WMC sold the deposit to Resolution Mining in 1987. At the start of its development in the 1990s, the Bulong nickel deposit was hailed as the potential starting point of another nickel boom in Western Australia, similar to the late 1960s and early 1970s.
WMC re-acquired a 70 percent interest in the project in October 1990, forming a joint-venture with Resolute Resources by investing A$1 million in cash and a commitment to carry out a feasibility study and to manage the proposed project as well as covering the first A$10 million of it. WMC had a test pit excavated in 1992 to gather data for the potential project, at a cost of A$450,000.
“Bulong Nickel Mine” enters the record as nickel mine in Western Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bulong, Nickel and Mine can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q111990147. Authority coordinates are -30.687, 121.816. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893, 1908, 1978 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bulong Nickel Mine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.