American Pacific Borate & Lithium Ltd (ASX:ABR) has been granted a trading halt by the ASX with news of a proposed capital raising imminent.
The halt will remain in place until the start of normal trading on Thursday, May 2, 2019, or when an announcement is released to the market, whichever occurs earliest.
ABR’s shares last traded at 22 cents on Monday.
READ: American Pacific Borate & Lithium optimisation work delivers high-purity boric acid
This month the company’s process optimisation works delivered a high-purity plus 99.9% pure boric acid crystal with minimal impurities on ore from the Fort Cady Borate Project in California, USA.
The works were designed to ensure consistent delivery of a technical grade quality boric acid crystal from the project.
The results of these works have been very encouraging with a final process now designed to ensure that a high-grade product with minimal impurities will be delivered.
Optimisation works include:
- Treating liquor (pregnant leach solution or PLS) retrieved on site from the Fort Cady ore body by solvent extraction using isoctanol as the organic extractant;
- Further treating the resulting liquor in a scrubbing stage to purify the liquor; and
- Crystallising the final liquor via a crystalliser manufacturer where the liquor was sent for evaluation and testing of crystallisation steps of the process.
READ: American Pacific Borate & Lithium finalising an enhanced DFS
The JORC-compliant mineral resource estimate for the deposit is 120.4 million tonnes at 6.5% boron oxide (11.6% boric acid equivalent) and 340 ppm lithium (5% boron cut-off) for 7.8 million tonnes of contained boron (13.9 million tonnes boric acid).
American Pacific wants to be construction ready quickly at Fort Cady and start building at the project as early as the latter part of 2019.