Terra Metals Ltd MD and CEO Thomas Line joined Jonathan Jackson in the Proactive studio to discuss how three high-grade concentrates produced at Dante Reefs have the potential to be a globally significant source of a range of commercially attractive products.
Proactive: Thomas, good morning. Good to see you.
Thomas Line: Good morning Jonathan. Thanks. Nice to be here.
High grade concentrates
Proactive: So let's start with these concentrates. This was part of the phase one metallurgical test work. Can you talk us through the work that was done and give us a quick overview of those results?
Thomas Line: Absolutely. So what we've done is really just use three simple, low-cost processing techniques to see if we can make multiple concentrate products out of a single source, which is the Dante Reefs. We've used a single composite sample, which we believe is representative of the overall deposit. And what that's shown is that we can make three high-grade, high-value concentrates out of a single deposit using only flotation and magnetic separation. That’s very significant because these are some of the most commonly used and lowest cost processing tools used on the planet.
Proactive: And I want to talk a little bit more about these high-grade concentrates. You’ve got copper, gold, PGMs, and vanadium grades in there. Can you talk us through these concentrates and exactly what we’re looking at here?
Thomas Line: Yes. So we produced three high-grade concentrates. One of those is a copper precious metal sulphide concentrate. It has high-grade copper at 28%, 17g per ton gold, and over 20g per ton platinum group metals (PGMs). That is considered an excellent commercial concentrate that would be expected to have high payabilities and would be acceptable to many smelters globally.
The second concentrate that we made from the same sample is a high-grade vanadium concentrate grading 1.81% V₂O₅. That is an excellent concentrate to be able to make from simple magnetic separation. It exceeds many of the companies we're aware of globally, which are producing vanadium concentrates, and it is suitable for feed into a salt roasting process to produce a high-quality, high-purity vanadium oxide product.
The third concentrate is a high-purity titanium ilmenite concentrate grading about 40% TiO₂. That is an excellent result. The recoveries are very good. We know from looking at companies globally in production right now, producing and selling titanium concentrate from hard rock sources, that that is an exceptional result for magnetic separation.
High potential source of products
Proactive: And that places your company and the Dante project as a potential competitive source for these products?
Thomas Line: Exactly. Given the size of the discovery so far — we are yet to report results, but we already know it’s large — this positions the project as a potentially globally significant and competitive source of all three concentrate products.
Proactive: Can you walk me through the overall potential here and what products we're actually looking at?
Thomas Line: We would expect that a deposit like this would be able to produce a large amount of copper, gold, and platinum, a large amount of vanadium products, and a large amount of titanium products. The collective grade of the metals in this deposit is very high. Now we can see that there are concentrates that can be produced, which we would expect to be payable using simple tools. It has a very good chance of being a producing deposit, commercially and competitively.
Phase 2 to come
Proactive: It’s just the start, really. You've got a plan for phase two metallurgical test work. What can we expect next?
Thomas Line: Yes, we’ve got phase two metallurgical test work underway. These are preliminary results. We haven’t optimised this at all. We expect to see improvements in concentrate qualities. That work is already underway. We're also looking to report a maiden resource. Given the 17,000 metres of drilling we did last year, we believe we can achieve the phase two work and the maiden resource without further major investment or costs.
Proactive: Plenty to look forward to there. Thanks for your time and we’ll speak again.
Thomas Line: Thanks, Jonathan. Appreciate it.