I don't even know what kind of nonsense you are making up here. 1N product? You mean, 90% Al2O3? That's impossible to make from merely washing the H-K product, which is stoichiometrically limited to ~46% Al2O3. The raw ore is ~36% Al2O3, within the clay. That's not alumina. It's clay. Different molecules. And, for reference, even raw calcined bauxite is not 90% Al2O3; it comes in at ~98% Al2O3. So the idea that one can make a product that doesn't exist, raw, out of clay, without some form of chemical treatment, is not even plausible.
2N (99% Al2O3) or 3N (99.9%) is not raw halloysite or kaolin. It would be what you make from a HCl process, without purification of the intermediate aluminium cholorohexahydrate. Which, if you've gone to the trouble of calcining the clay at 350 degrees, digesting it in hydrochloric acid, is a stupid place to stop; may as well go straight to 4N.
For reference, Wagerup in Perth makes 2N (99.5%) alumina at the rate of ~5,000tpa, for specialty ceramics and abrasives, from bauxite. It trades of $1200-1500/t. It's a specialty product, and all things being equal, would out-compete 2N alumina produced from kaolin, any day of the week, simply on the basis of the sunk costs of the plant and equipment.
The whole HPA scene is only attractive for getting to 4N. If you don't achieve 4N, you don't get the magic value.
Also, you seem confused about the difference between alumina and kaolin-halloysite. Just to confirm, there's no way to directly compare the two, because H-K are clay minerals. There's silica and water in there. Alumina is a pure oxide. To get from H-K to HPA isn't as simple as washing and grinding. It's a chemical reaction.
The price of halloysite, and volumes needed, are entirely up in the air, from what I've read. It's very similar to Talga's graphene; new material, with some established uses, traded at high prices in small volumes, suddenly found in a huge deposit somewhere. Doesn't mean it's going to transfer into a mass export commodity at high volumes and high prices.
ANd, to reiterate, when the CSIRO improves the assay method to 2um, all the 45um analyses are now inaccurate. The realy percantage of halloysite in the deposit cannot, now, be estimated reliably with 45um Q-XRD analyses. Therefore, what I would expect, is that ADN will have to make a choice about finding a small (tens of thousands of tonnes) subset of the resource with 90% halloysite, and spend a boatload of money proving it up, and put a ring fence around it and declare it as a halloysite resource. The rest, they may assay with 45um Q-XRD, and wear the low accuracy of the method, and produce a kaolin resource with halloysite in it.
ANd, just so you're clear, the Al2O3 chemical assays, are by and large irrelevant to this, I would think, given that this is a mineral based resource for a specialty industrial mineral. Mineral quantification is more important than chemical quantification, if you are hoping to sell a 90% halloysite premium product.
Expand
(20min delay)