Yeah so anything with ammonium sulphate or sodium chloride is the salt leach.
Additionally anything at Ph3-5 is effectively close to neutral.
If you read the text carefully of others announcements they say. "appears to be ionic", "could be ionic" "ionic nature" "behaves like ionic" "potentialy for ionic" it's just salesman BS.
This "weak aqua regia digest" testing for easily soluble material is actually pretty bogus. It's just comparable 2 sampling methods and the they calculate the difference between the 2 as the recovery.
I saw once announcement that had 102% recovery using weak aqua regia digest. Riddle me how you actually get 102% recovery in a mining application. You don't. It's because there just doing 2 different assay sampling methods and saying that the difference between a very accurate sample method and a weak qua regia test is the recovery. It's not a leach test and the weak aqua regia is actually in most circumstances extremely acidic. It's weak in comparison to the traditional sampling method but not weak at all usually sub PH1.
In short, unless the announcement stipulates they've leached with ammonia sulphate, magnesium sulphate, sodium chloride and the ph3.5-4.5 any statement made about there actually being ionic material is actually inaccurate IMO. If the company has genuine done a leach with a neutral pH and fails to actually announce that then they're pretty incompetent. Lack of information or deliberate omission of detail is usually an indication that it's not in ones best benefit to stipulate it.
ITM's comment today is suggesting they're conducting a couple test.
The PH4 tells you the ionic component and the recoveries under an extremely cost effective method.
The acid leach at pH1-2 is a dosed sample.
Having those 2 results tell you if there's any ionic material and secondly whether you will get economic recovers without having to dose the living daylights out of it with acid.
If you only get good recovers with sub pH1 acid leaching, it's goodnight irene as that's extremely cost intensive operationally and in other circumstances completely impractical.
An analogy;
Imagine you wanted to test how easy it is the break an coconut. Because you've got 1million to crack.
You intend to break the coconut with a baseball bat.
Do you
a) Try and break the coconut with a bat made out of tungsten swinging it at the speed of light. excellent the coconut breaks 80% of time . Unfortunately it's completely impractical for us to ever implement this at scale due to the cost. Great test... not.
b) try and break the coconut with a regular baseball base made out of wood swinging it at a nominal speed. 20% of the coconut breaks. excellent hey team, turns out we are probably going to be able to purchase bats as a cost effective method to break these coconut, lets test a bat made out of wood with some steel inserts and then trying and find the sweet spot.
Effectively what other companies are doing is testing whether a coconut breaks with a tungsten bat and comparing it to if it breaks with a bat made of hardened steel and calling the difference between them a "recovery". yet neither of the methods proves it's probably going to be a viable method to do so. Just that coconuts typically break if you hit them hard enough.
https://cdn-api.markitdigital.com/a...pdf?access_token=0007vnoe73nikz8U9H5Wh96tisivabove it the announcement where ITM done the correct test and reserve the right to suggest that they do in fact have ionic material present on at least 2 of their tenements. hopefully carablue bluff will prove a 3rd.
View attachment 4593070View attachment 4593109Some IXR leach results showing the recoveries across varying pH levels and variety of neutral salts etc.
View attachment 4593118Some very early IXR tests here show the variability of recovery from 4 drills holes under a weak and strong pH.
Note in the bottom graph the holes135 and 134 are quite low under pH3.5 but jump under pH1.
Furthermore and quite importantly note how the La and Ce recovery very poorly.
This is actually a good result. Because La and Ce are worthless. It means you end up with a better basket post processing. Unlike hard rocks whereby the recovery across the site of elements is linear.
LREO recovering at lower levels than HREO is generally another sign of ionic material being present and secondly that a good post processing concentrate can be achieved.
ITM's results shown in blue put them atleast in the same space as some of IXR early testwork for ionic component. If they had of leach under a sub pH1 level they would know nothing more other than if we put enough acid in this stuff the REO will drop out. Doesn't tell you viability or to what extent the product may beneficiate to.
Not sure if this helps the forum or confuses it further.
SF2TH
