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TAW - Excellent Results from Large Scale Metallurgical Test Work

Tawana Resources NL (“Tawana” or the “Company”) and Alliance Mineral Assets Limited (SGX: AMAL) are pleased to announce that larger scale metallurgical test work has delivered exceptional results which will allow
for a simple, low-capital, low-risk startup operation and a short construction period for the planned commissioning at the Bald Hill Lithium and Tantalum Mine in October 2017.

Highlights

• Larger scale metallurgical test work completed.
• Two key findings of Bald Hill mineralisation are:
• The ability to produce grades well in excess of 6% Li2O at good mass yields and acceptably low iron content.
• The ability to reject 60-70% of the feed mass after a first pass Dense Media Separation (DMS), thus reducing processing costsappreciably.
• After removal of -1mm fines and mica, 78% of feed to the plant, containing 83% of the lithium, is available for low-cost gravity DMS processing.
• Recovery to immediately marketable concentrates from the DMS is 76.4% with an additional 21.8% reporting to secondary concentrates for future processing. This equates to about 129,000tpa of high grade
coarse concentrate grading +6.4% Li2O at 1mtpa of feed.
• In addition, a total of 285,000t of fines and secondary concentrates, per million tonnes of feed, would be stockpiled for stage 2 processing or initially treated through the tantalum circuit.
• The benefits of the selected process route, for the stage one DMS circuit, are:
- Low capital cost
- Short time to commissioning, low risk
- Very low processing cost
- Production of a coarse high grade premium concentrate
• A circuit to treat the fines and secondary concentrates will be constructed after production commences and will be funded out of cash flow. This is expected to add ~45,000t of concentrate at limited incremental cost.
• The plan is to operate the existing tantalum plant concurrently with the DMS spodumene circuit adding significant by-product credits. This plant would be fed from fines from the DMS circuit and additional high grade
tantalum mineralisation mined whilst mining lithium mineralisation.
• The DMS Feasibility study is well advanced with plant and infrastructure costings for the DMS circuit expected at the end of March.
• A 5 tonne sample is currently being processed to provide concentrate parcels for potential off-take partners.
• A number of off-take partners have visited the Project in the past few weeks and the company is currently advancing negotiations for offtake.