King River Copper Ltd (ASX:KRC) is well known for its recent bonanza grade gold hits at the Mt Remarkable Project in Western Australia, but equally important is the company's progress on the Speewah Vanadium Concept Study.
Highlighting the potential scale, Speewah is Australia’s largest vanadium-in-magnetite resource, and comprises a measured, indicated and inferred resource of 4.712 billion tonnes at 0.3% vanadium, 2% titanium and 14.7% iron.
The flat lying nature of the Speewah mineralisation gives King River the opportunity to mine very large volumes of material with minimum waste.
As an example, 0.4 tonne waste to 1.0 tonne mineralised material.
The extraction methods that are being trialled to produce high purity products present further opportunities for the company to more readily value add to the much higher value vanadium electrolyte and titanium sponge products.
King River noted: "The nature of these different technical studies is complex and process optimisation does take time.
"Through this comprehensive scoping process, the company aims to present our shareholders with the most prudent commercial strategy to advance towards the production of high purity vanadium, titanium and iron products at the lowest unit cost."
Objectives of the Concept Study
The main objective of the Concept Study is to identify and address the technical hurdles necessary to complete a Scoping Study into the production of high purity vanadium pentoxide (99.5-99.9% V2O5), titanium dioxide (>99% TiO2) and iron oxide (>68% Fe2O3) products.
Production would utilise a novel hydrometallurgical process using a concentrate derived from the Speewah Central vanadium deposit.
King River is also investigating the means for production of vanadium electrolyte products used in vanadium flow batteries.
Items still to be addressed in the Concept Study include:
- Finalising the Hydrometallurgical Process Flow Sheet and capital and processing cost estimates;
- Finalising the Beneficiation Plant design and capital and processing cost estimates; and
- Final open pit optimisation and mining schedule study using the operating cost estimates.
Once these items have been addressed, King River will finalise a Scoping Study into the preliminary economics of the Speewah Vanadium Project.