today extract only:
The Aust
Robert Gottliebsen
With minerals in huge demand, Australia must exploit its terbium breakthrough
China has turned off the terbium export tap, leaving the US in urgent need of the substance and other heavy rare earths to maintain its defence capability and take part in the computer enhancement revolution.
And just as
technology developments are going to transform energy, the minerals industry, including rare earths, will follow.
Australia is a leader in the non-China world in pioneering new terbium and gold extraction methods.
The Morgan family is best known for opinion polls, but Gary Morgan, via Haoma Mining, has spent 15 years developing new treatment technology which, on a pilot scale, achieves very high terbium recoveries. Australia has the potential to relieve the chronic shortages.
The US is looking to Ukraine to relieve its long-term terbium and other heavy rare earths shortages. But Ukraine deposits require further testing and heavy investment.
At least in theory and assuming the pilot can be scaled, Australia could be providing terbium concentrate within a year. However, the concentrates produced by Elazac will need to be refined either by an existing refinery in the US or a new operation in Australia or the US.
But once the bureaucrats, Aboriginal groups and environmentalists discover what could happen, a multitude of applications will descend on the project, aiming to delay it by a globally disastrous three or four years.
The Elazac process is based on separating tiny parts of material. It was developed to extract gold economically in WA’s Bamboo Creek Valley and in tailings from previous mining.
In the rare earths pilot, after first extracting the gold via Elazac, the terbium and other heavy rare earths were extracted via an adapted version of Elazac. Costs were slashed.
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interesting - but the arguments still remain.
- High cost of primary mining operation to get to production.
- Years and years to get to production
- Still need to refine the MREC produced - and that would be overseas
- As stated above, given it is Australian - unbelievable amount of paperwork, approvals to achieve and navigate through.
- Need to navigate the myriad of "special interest" groups, and legal processes in order to even get a shovel in the ground.
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IMHO, it is still not a patch on IXR Recycling tech, and refining tech.
If above process ever comes to production, they can enlist Ionic Tech to refine their product.
We will have the processes and modular refining process sorted by then.
Just shows how far IXR is ahead of the game.
(20min delay)