Alex Dorsch

Alex Dorsch is the Managing Director and CEO of Chalice Mining (ASX: CHN), the Australian company behind the Gonneville project — a palladium, platinum, nickel, copper and cobalt deposit about 70 km northeast of Perth, Western Australia. He has led Chalice since 2018 and is now taking Gonneville toward a final investment decision (FID — the point at which a company commits to fund and build a mine) targeted for the first half of 2028. For resource investors, Gonneville stands out as one of the few large palladium developments outside Russia and South Africa, the countries that supply most of the world's platinum group elements (PGE — metals used mainly in catalytic converters).

A mechanical engineer with first-class honors and a finance degree from the University of Adelaide, Dorsch worked in engineering roles at BHP — including Olympic Dam — spent around six years in upstream oil and gas, and was a specialist consultant at McKinsey & Company before joining Chalice in 2017. In early 2020, Chalice's geologists discovered Gonneville under farmland the company controlled, a greenfields (previously unexplored) find widely regarded as one of Australia's most significant in decades. Under his leadership, Chalice has entered the ASX 300, raised more than A$350 million, and signed a 2024 memorandum of understanding with Mitsubishi Corporation covering the project's pre-feasibility study (PFS — the engineering and economic study one step below full feasibility). He was named Kitco's CEO of the Year in 2020 and received the Young Mining Professionals' Peter Munk Award in 2022.

Dorsch's development plan favors staged capital and early returns. The December 2025 PFS outlines a two-stage, roughly 23-year open-pit operation in which Stage 1 requires about A$820 million of upfront capital and targets payback in roughly 2.7 years, before Stage 2 expands throughput from 5 to 12–14 million tonnes a year. He expects 50–70% of construction costs to be met with debt, supported by export credit agencies and offtake partners (companies that contract to buy future production). His market view is straightforward: palladium supply is concentrated in a handful of operations, and in his words "there is really no ability for an existing supplier to add more metal to the market." Chalice has also designed its flowsheet (the plant's processing route) to produce a concentrate that does not depend on South African downstream processing.

For investors tracking critical minerals, Dorsch offers a close-up view of how a junior discovery becomes a mine. The milestones he has laid out are specific: feasibility study completion in the first half of 2027, offtake agreements in the second half of 2027, project financing and major environmental approvals in the first half of 2028, and first production in early 2030. He also serves as a non-executive director of explorer Falcon Metals (ASX: FAL). Following Chalice through this sequence shows, step by step, what a developer must prove — technically, commercially, and regulatorily — before a modern critical minerals project gets built.