Pursuant to the terms of an exclusive, life of mine, mining services agreement (MSA) with Reed Industrial Minerals Pty Ltd (RIM - the owner of the Mt Marion tenements), MRL (through its wholly owned subsidiary, Process Minerals International Pty Ltd (PMI)) designed, built and now operates the Mt Marion lithium project.
The MSA was executed in September 2015. The initial scope of work under the MSA required PMI to design, construct, own and operate a Crushing Plant and a Beneficiation Plant capable of producing 200,000 tonnes per annum of 6% spodumene concentrate product (6% Product).
During early to mid-calendar year (CY) 2016, MRL engineered innovative design changes to the process flow of the Beneficiation Plant that would enable the tailings stream to be further processed in order to produce a saleable, 4% spodumene concentrate product (4% Product).
In August 2016 (following construction and commissioning of the Crushing Plant but before construction of the Beneficiation Plant was completed), RIM and PMI agreed to vary the MSA to allow for an optimised Beneficiation Plant with a name plate capacity of a total of 405,000 tonnes of spodumene concentrate product with a notionally product split of: o 200,000tpa of coarse 6% Product; o 125,000tpa of coarse 4% Product; and o 80,000tpa of a fine 4% Product from a flotation circuit that would be installed at an agreed time following commissioning of the coarse product circuit.
The commissioning of the re-designed Mt Marion Beneficiation Plant (capable of producing both 6% and 4% Products) took approximately four months longer than the time PMI originally envisaged would be required to commission the single stage Beneficiation Plant that was only capable of producing 200,000 tonnes per annum of 6% Product.
The first shipment of Mt Marion spodumene concentrate product shipped from the Kwinana Port in February 2017.
The coarse product circuit of the Beneficiation Plant is achieving an annualised production rate in excess of 474,000 tonnes of product per annum of coarse 6% and 4% Products. This volume does not include any tonnes of the fine 4% Product that will be produced once the flotation circuit is commissioned.
The Beneficiation Plant is achieving substantially in excess of its budgeted mass yield recovery. The mass yield recovery being achieved also materially surpasses the maximum yield that the independent laboratory thought possible when it tested the Mt Marion ore during the design and engineering phase of the Mt Marion project.
GFL International Co., Ltd. (wholly owned subsidiary of Jiangxi Ganfeng Lithium Co., Ltd), the 43.1% shareholder of RIM and the offtake partner for the Mt Marion Project, has publicly announced to the Shenzhen stock exchange that the Mt Marion spodumene concentrate is the best converting spodumene concentrate product it has processed to date through its downstream processing plants in China.
NMT Price at posting:
35.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
