Results Confirm Excellent Vanadium Chemical Product Purity
Neometals Ltd (ASX: NMT) has successfully completed a continuous pilot trial for the company’s Vanadium Recovery Project (VRP).
The trials processed approximately 14 tonnes of vanadium-bearing steel by-product (Slag) over 24 days from three Scandinavian steel mills. Results confirmed excellent vanadium chemical product purity (consistently higher that 99.5% V2O5) and strong recoveries (recoveries exceeded 75% during steady state) for Neometals’ patent pending hydrometallurgical process for recovering vanadium from Slag.
Neometals has executed a collaboration agreement with Critical Metals Ltd to jointly evaluate the feasibility of constructing a facility to recover and process high-grade vanadium products from Slag generated by steel producer SSAB in Scandinavia.
Neometals is funding and managing the evaluation activities, including pilot trials and evaluation studies up to consideration of a final investment decision, which, if positive, will earn Neometals a 50% interest in an incorporated joint venture (JV) with Critical.
The Pilot was constructed, commissioned and operated continuously through three trials (one for each source of Slag) without any safety incidents or process challenges.
The Pilot confirmed, at a 25 times higher throughput rate, the earlier mini-pilot plant results.
Neometals, Managing Director, Chris Reed, said that of particular importance was the increase in vanadium concentrations achieved during the Pilot which offers potentially significant operating and capital cost savings in the product recovery stages of the process.
Passing this major technical milestone is important and gives Neometals strong confidence to select engineers, commence the Feasibility Study (FS) and provide larger samples for product evaluation and offtake discussions.
“We are very pleased to confirm, at scale, the exceptional product purities and recoveries from our proprietary, carbon sequestering, vanadium recovery process,” Mr Reed said.
“Data from the Pilot will now feed into our Feasibility Study to confirm potential lowest- quartile operating costs and leading capital cost estimates from the earlier PFS. The Pilot has significantly de-risked the project enabling the acceleration of commercial offtake discussions, reagent sourcing and approvals processes for the development of the project at the Port of Pori, Finland.”
For further information please visit: http://www.neometals.com.au/
