European Green Transition PLC (AIM:EGT) chief executive Aiden Lavelle explains to Proactive why he is so pleased with sample results from the Olserum Rare Earths.
Aiden Lavelle: We've had a busy few months. We've announced a lot of rock and channel sample results over the past few months, but today we've announced the preliminary metallurgical results.
These results show that the mineralization data at Olserum can produce a concentrate and that we are getting very good recoveries of between 80 and 90%.
Aiden Lavelle: We're also getting grades between 10 and 12% total rare earth oxide in the first pass flotation.
And then we've also upgraded that initial recovered product with high-intensity magnetic separation.
That’s giving us concentrates of up to 40% total rare earth oxide.
So that's a very high grade and we're very pleased with the results of that.
Proactive: How do these fit in relative to the other sample results?
Aiden Lavelle: This was a much larger sample. It was 135kg sent to GTK in Finland last year.
And that sample consists of about six broad intervals of mineralization from the historic Olserum deposit, so that's very different from some of the smaller field samples, which are collected on the ground during mapping, prospecting and channel sampling.
Aiden Lavelle: This sample took several months of testing. There were a total of 20 different bench flotation studies to optimize the recovery and figure out which would be the best way to separate out the minerals.
So, what the experts at GTK have done is they've been able to float off the minerals with the rare earth.
Aiden Lavelle: So that's the monazite and xenotime and also the apatite, all three phosphate minerals.
The process also basically used rotation and magnetic separation, common practices used in many other base metal mines.
So there's nothing new here in terms of the technology. And it shows that we can produce a concentrate that can then, potentially be sent elsewhere.
Aiden Lavelle: So we can leverage other companies' processing capabilities and, against that, the project optionality going forward.
Proactive: EGT said before that it plans to begin drilling in the second half of the year. Are you still on track for that?
Aiden Lavelle: We are liaising about mobilization that, but yes, that will take place in the current quarter.
Our team are getting ready to mobilize to sites. So we expect to announce the start of drilling in the coming weeks.