Randy Scott says that the processing, particularly the separation side of things, is very competitive. He has been spending a lot of time and a lot of money trying to look at adding value to their concentrates, which he thinks he has done nicely with the pure concentrate they are producing, but because of that they wanted to look at going up the value chain and further separating the products. They have test work underway now for a couple of three months to try to evaluate how their concentrates would perform if they were to develop technology to further separate them.
From a separation side, they have been able to develop technology that is able to remove cerium and thorium in one selective precipitation step. Then we followed that with the ability to do solvent extraction, but only one or two stages of solvent extraction, to look at further purifying the material and actually separating the rare earths into light rare earths. They have moved forward with that as well. As a result of the preliminary feasibility study and the multiple pilot plants that they have done on the project they believe that it was a good time to look at moving up into even a larger scale production, to a commercial production facility.
They have obtained a 1,000-ton sample from a near-surface exposure of our high-grade material. This is where the preliminary feasibility study has the initial mining starting. We wanted to be able to confirm these high-grade zones. We were able to do that by trenching approximately 225 feet and then sampling that as well. We were very pleased by the average grade of 10.1 per cent for that 1,000 tons.
Resource Portal for I2M Clients, Associates, and Geoscientists
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-