When I visited the mine site mid-year, Andrew gave me a Cooke's...

When I visited the mine site mid-year, Andrew gave me a Cooke's tour, and although he controlled the conversation, what he ventured to say was interesting enough for me not to want disrupt the flow of the conversation by being too assertive. From memory, I raised five issues:

1) Why was the ramp-up so slow?
2) Was it difficult to get staff prepared to commute to the mine?
3) Would European buyers continue to buy from WAK when the war in Ukraine ended?
4) Did WAK have a problem with discoloured titanium dioxide crystals?
5) Was the initiative to monetise the silica sand receiving attention?

Andrew did not give a satisfactory answer to the first question, which I crassly asked upfront. I let that matter slide, but as the tour progressed, I worked my other questions into the conversation more diplomatically, and I got good answers. At the time I presumed the slow ramp-up related to production glitches, but I held my tongue.

Now that I know the nature of the problem, which relates to K99F (a fine-grained product),the slow ramp-up makes sense, because K99F is the subject matter of the off-take agreement with Stanco. Why the problem had not manifested itself in the pilot plant, I cannot say – perhaps the volumes for K99F were too small for agglomeration to block the secondary filter, and it took WAK's huge order placed in March to bring the problem to notice. The the DFI listed scaling up as a risk, but it did not suggest any specific risks.

WAK's ore has, on average, coarse-grained kaolin that suits K99C (a ceramic product), and in that sense K99F (a fibreglass product) does not suit the ore body, and I imagine that the pull came from Stanco to produce a finer product, rather than a push coming from WAK. I was always astounded that WAK offered a fine-grained product like K99F, because it is well known in the art that it is difficult to sieve dry material finer than 45 microns. It is done by the likes of Imerys using air-flow beneficiation, so there are known solutions to the problem. Fine powder agglomerates and won't pass through sub-45-micron mesh, unless forced. If you Google. sieve "45" microns wikipedia you can read, “fine powder which tends to agglomerate (mostly < 45 µm) – in a dry sieving process this tendency would lead to a clogging of the sieve meshes and this would make a further sieving process impossible." You can read further down, and learn about air jet sieving, which has air jets on the input side of the mesh, and a vacuum on the output side. If there are two or more meshes in the circuitry, they must each have their own air-jet and vacuum systems.

Had the off-take agreement been for K99C, a coarse-grained product, the problem would probably not have arisen so soon. In a later post I'll cover K99C – a product for which WAK's ore is superb. As an aside, a coarse-grained ore with well ordered crystallinity also suits delamination. That Management is keen to push both, is not a surprise, and I have always suspected WAK would let Stanco run with K99F, and WAK's marketing focus would be on the pressure-cast ceramics and the paper-coatings subsectors.

By the way, I understand that designing and patenting plant is Alfred Baker's metier, so Andrew Sorensen probably relied on Alfred Baker's expertise. The K99F problem will be resolved --I see it as a set-back, not a mortal blow.