Even as nickel prices are expected to remain low, more foreign mining companies disclosed plans of investing billions of dollars to put up nickel processing plants in the Philippines.

Norway-based Intex Resources ASA said it would spend as much as $2.9 billion to put up a high-pressure acid leach facility within the site of its Mindoro Nickel mine.

Australia’s Rusina Mining Ltd. will invest $400 million for a heap-leaching facility at its Acoje project in Zambales province, its CEO and managing director Robert Gregory said.

MRL Gold Philippines, a wholly owned unit of Canada's Mindoro Resources Ltd., is considering building a $500-million nickel processing plant in the southern Philippines, its CEO Tony Climie said.

The disclosures followed one on Tuesday by Nickel Asia Corp. that it and Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. Ltd. of Japan were finalizing plans to put up a second nickel-processing plant in Surigao del Norte province that would cost $1.7 billion.

Intex president and CEO Erlend T. Grimstad said the company’s plant would be built in two stages: The first will process limonite ore and the second, the saprolite resource.

Grimstad said the capacity of the processing plant during the first stage would run up to about 40,000 tons of nickel and 3,000 tons of cobalt a year. At Stage 2, the facility would produce another 40,000 tons of nickel and an additional 700 tons of cobalt a year, he said.

The Mindoro mine, a nickel laterite deposit that may be one of the biggest in the world, covers 9,720 hectares of land straddling the border of the provinces of Oriental Mindoro and Occidental Mindoro. Most of the drilling work and evaluation were done initially in Kisluyan and Buraboy areas. Technical evaluation placed the current limonite resource at more than 100 million dry metric tons with 0.9 percent nickel and 0.07 percent cobalt.

MRL Gold’s Climie said the company’s plant in Surigao was likely to begin construction in 2010 and would have a capacity of 7,500-10,000 metric tons of contained nickel a year. He said MRL could invite a partner into the project, and a Chinese steel mill was a possibility, but no decision had been taken.

Rusina’s Gregory said the company expected to finish the feasibility study for its heap-leaching plant within the month, after which it would move to the engineering design phase.

Rusina, in partnership with European Nickel PLC, expects the heap-leach facility to produce 25,000 tons of nickel a year, he said.

“Aside from just shipping nickel ore, we can now process it here through the facility,” he said. “We have enough nickel for these two projects.”

Rusina, through Zambales Diversified Metals Corp., develops and processes nickel from the Acoje mine, which is estimated to have reserves of 33 million tons.

The Acoje mine produced more than three million tons of chromium concentrate until the early 1990s. With a report from Amy R. Remo; edited by INQUIRER.net