Its good that they are looking at the DMS material size issue.
When Atlantic Lithium put out their Aug 2022 pre-feasibility they were looking at 2Mtpa DMS circuit (with a separate feldspar sub-loop). DMS feed goes into the primary DMS. Floats = felspar/waste. Sinks = better stuff. The sinks then progressed through to a much smaller secondary DMS where the floats went to a recrush circuit and the Sinks were spodumene ore. A pretty standard lithium DMS flow sheet but only catering to one size meaning 2mm and 10mm product would be bouncing around inside the DMS together. Keith Muller who several have noted in social media is one of the few genuine DMS operational experts got recruited to the Atlantic project. By the June 2023 DFS was released the DMS size had changed to 2.7Mt but so had the configuration. Rather than a single primary/secondary circuit, their were now 3 pairs of Primary/Secondary DMS's catering to coarse (5.6mm to 10mm), Fine (2.8mm to 5.6mm) and Ultrafine particle sizes (0.85mm to 2.8mm). Keiths experience had shown that you would get better operational performance by having modestly smaller DMS units targeting particular ore sizes rather than just having one super big DMS and in the case of lithium a smaller secondary DMS.
Fast forward to E25 and they are talking about exploring the characteristics of smaller and larger particle sizes within a DMS environment. It would appear E25 are taking good advice this time that particle size mix does matter for how efficiently a DMS plant works.
A possible secondary benefit is that If two DMS pair's of different sizes are part of the final 1.1Mtpa output plan, the smaller of these DMS plants may possibly be able to be got to site earlier rather than later in the timeline. If E25 had access to or got a DMS unit onsite so they could produce a higher manganese concentrate product the grade gap between what they could produce and the missing GEMCO product would reduce. There would also be two cost saving benefits (possibly two of the largest) being a perhaps 12% reduction in trucking costs by shifting a more concentrated ore to Port Headland. While its never been confirmed, its been speculated that E25 has offtake contracts that somehow decline the price per DMTU as grade falls lower in the contract range. A DMS plant would assist E25 to product that received a smaller price discount.
