Antimony, page-150

I don't have the time needed to do a proper post but it is worth noting that the only current exporter of Antimony product is the Costerfield Operation in Victoria and they export ore to China for processing. China's block on exporting means that if they continue to sell to China that the wider world will not see any benefit from our production as our production will remain there. I seriously doubt our Politicians and Defense sector will allow that to continue, considering the ongoing pleasant hostilities ongoing from 2020 and Costerfields product will have to be diverted elsewhere.

Australia itself only has one plant capable of processing Antimony ore and that is at Hillgrove. I have been meaning to touch base with Ron for a while to quiz him about the configuration of our plant, I believe it was configured as a Chloride treatment plant, which is a different process to what the historic USA plants used (They used an Alkali exchange process). A possible reason for this was the inherently high grade of feedstock into the plant...not sure. My Antimony metallurgy research is fairly basic at the moment No idea how its done in China. Process plant in Oman and India are primarily Roasters as far as I have been able to work out, suited to lower grade feed material.

I have far too much other stuff going on in life *right now* to get onto LRV to ask the questions but if I get a chance and get time I will do a brief overview of the process differences. The Chloride treatment system is subject to high upkeep due to the corrosive nature of the process, who knows it may have been reconfigured since. Obviously the engineering study will go into this in great detail but that's a fair way off yet.