American Rare Earths Ltd has achieved a metallurgical milestone for the Halleck Creek Rare Earths Project, confirming the ore from the tenure can be upgraded at a ratio of 10 to 1 through a simple early-stage beneficiation process.
The company also highlighted that 93.5% of non-rare earth material can be removed in early-stage processing, meaning only 6.5% of mined ore will require further refining, notably reducing processing costs.
Metallurgical work confirms ARR’s scoping study assumptions that a 10x ore upgrade can be achieved, supporting the upcoming pre-feasibility study’s (PFS) flow sheet and de-risking the project’s economics.
Updated scoping study incoming
“These results confirm exactly what we anticipated — Halleck Creek ore can be efficiently upgraded using simple, low-cost conventional processing methods,” American Rare Earths CEO Chris Gibbs said.
“Successfully demonstrating this at production scale is a major milestone, further de-risking the project as we advance toward development.
“This large-scale test work validates the 10x upgrade assumption in our scoping study and provides further confidence in the project’s potential.
“With these results in hand, we will issue an updated scoping study shortly, incorporating the JORC resource increase announced earlier this month.
“Looking ahead, we are advancing metallurgical test work to optimise processing efficiency and conducting hydrometallurgical testing to refine our flowsheet.
“This work remains on track to support the development of our pre-feasibility study.”
Testing conducted by Mineral Technologies upgraded mineralised feedstock from 3,438 parts per million (ppm) total rare earth oxides (TREO) to about 37,200 TREO, using commercially proven processing methods.
ARR says its optimisation work is ongoing, as the company works to enhance mineral recoveries, streamline its processing flowsheets, lower costs, and support the release of the upcoming pre-feasibility study.