A second round of testwork on Surefire Resources’ breakthrough pre-treatment metallurgy has lifted the direct vanadium recovery from its massive Victory Bore magnetite resource near Mt Magnet in Western Australia’s Mid West region to 97 per cent.
The company says its proprietary method alleviates the vanadium industry’s standard needs for high-pressure treatment or high-temperature roasting of pre-treated magnetite and brings significant capex and opex advantages. The advantages come from the removal of major infrastructural elements, particularly those associated with the roasting stream, the consequent reduction in its process carbon footprint and from significantly-reduced leach time and overall energy consumption.
Surefire’s provisional patent application relating specifically to its innovative “pre-leach” treatment of its magnetite concentrate, allowing the leaching agent to scavenge vanadium more effectively from the concentrate. Management says the latest testwork was a direct follow-on from its evaluation of pre-treated magnetite concentrate last month, where it used the same composite sample material as tested previously – a factor that further validates its latest result.
That 500kg sample was made up from 20 separate 1m samples taken from a single reverse-circulation (RC) drillhole in the centre of the Victory Bore deposit.
The company says the sample was prepared using standard metallurgical beneficiation methods to produce a clean magnetite, with a 250kg cut taken for initial testwork and the remaining 250kg residue being retained as a record and for further testing, including the latest work. The previous work produced encouraging extraction rates of 91 per cent vanadium and 88 per cent titanium in an extended leach time of 96 hours.
At the time of reporting the initial results, Surefire concluded that perhaps more vanadium could be recovered by extending the leach time, but it now appears that further proprietary metallurgical tweaking has significantly reduced the leach exposure to just 24 hours while increasing the vanadium recovery to 97 per cent. .
The company says it will now continue to evaluate its process and assess the potential of licencing it for use on other vanadium resources. It says that while metals production from the leach solution is a conventional and well understood solvent extraction process, it plans to include it in its scaling-up tests to confirm product purity and establish grades along the full extent of the process stream.
If the scale-up tests are successful, management says it will include it in its development plans for the Victory Bore project.
The total measured, indicated and inferred JORC-compliant resource at both Victory Bore and Unaly Hill is 321 million tonnes at 0.4 per cent vanadium pentoxide, representing a critical mineral resource potentially of world-class status and with significant expansion potential.
With the global shift to clean energy options, Surefire’s giant, high-purity vanadium resource looks like it may come online just at the right time.
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By Doug Bright
