Qualla: Mount Keith Mine

Mount Keith Mine: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. From the air, it looks like a wound that engineering opened on purpose: a grey-green amphitheatre 2.4 kilometres long and 300 metres deep, terraced in concentric benches that spiral toward a floor where haul trucks the size of houses crawl like beetles. This is Mount Keith, one of the largest open-pit nickel mines on the planet, gouged into some of the oldest rock on Earth. There is no city here, no river, barely a tree. The nearest town, Wiluna, sits 85 kilometres to the north. Everything else is the flat red silence of the Western Australian outback, and into that silence the mine pours the steady industrial roar of an operation that once supplied metal to the whole world.

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Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mount Keith Mine: Reading Rock Two Billion Years Old

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Public domain. The nickel at Mount Keith was laid down long before there were animals, plants, or breathable air. It sits in ultramafic rock roughly 2,700 million years old, part of the 800-kilometre Norseman-Wiluna greenstone belt that snakes across the ancient Yilgarn Craton. These deposits f...

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Image: Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center | Public domain

Mount Keith Mine: The Mine That Waited a Quarter-Century

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Public domain. Geologists drilling for Metals Exploration Limited found the deposit in 1969. By 1971 some believed it could supply a tenth of the world's nickel. Then it sat, untouched, for almost twenty-five years. Nickel prices were too low through the 1970s, and the cost of building a mine a...

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Image: Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center | Public domain

Mount Keith Mine: Concentrate, Then a Long Road South

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Public domain. Mount Keith does not produce finished nickel. It crushes and processes ore on site into a concentrate, which is then trucked roughly down the Goldfields to Leinster for drying, and onward through BHP's Nickel West chain - the Kalgoorlie smelter, the Kwinana refinery near Perth. W...

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Image: Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center | Public domain

Mount Keith Mine: When the World Stopped Needing the Metal

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Public domain. The end, when it came, came from a glut. A wave of cheap Indonesian nickel flooded global markets, prices collapsed, and on 11 July 2024 BHP announced it would suspend all of Nickel West - Mount Keith included - placing the operations into care and maintenance from October. The d...

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Image: Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center | Public domain