Record Scandium Recovery
Mount Ridley Mines achieves record scandium recovery using half the reagent dose.
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Mount Ridley Mines reported that its third Selectro™ leach test achieved 91.8% scandium recovery, up from 80%, while using half the reagent dose of earlier tests. Testing on unbeneficiated ore from the Grass Patch project also produced average recoveries of 84% for heavy rare earths and 77% for light rare earths, with peak recoveries reached in under four hours at low temperature and atmospheric pressure. Gallium recovery declined to about 41.5% from 55.8%, underscoring that further reagent tuning and beneficiation may be needed for individual metals. The company says the results will inform updated process economics, flotation and bulk-sample testing, as well as validation on third-party feed that could expand Selectro’s use to lower-grade material not suited to high-pressure autoclave processing. Grass Patch contains 47,357 tonnes of contained scandium, according to the company, though the results remain at the laboratory-testing stage.
Key Points
1
Grass Patch contains 47,357 tonnes of contained scandium within a 946-million-tonne resource grading 50.1 parts per million, and is located about 25 kilometres from the port of Esperance in Western Australia.
2
The latest laboratory sample was a composite prepared from five historical Grass Patch diamond holes, and testing was conducted without prior beneficiation.
3
Mount Ridley said the lower reagent dose could provide additional cost benefits beyond the process’s existing closed-loop design, while noting that the concentration threshold at which recovery begins to decline has not yet been established.
4
The company attributed Test 3’s improved results to molecular tuning of the Selectro chemistry, which allows the leaching molecule to be adjusted toward targeted metals; the process is wholly owned and patent-pending.
5
Unlike Selectro’s low-temperature, atmospheric-pressure approach, listed scandium developers commonly use high-pressure acid leaching in autoclaves at about 250°C. Cashu Research cited disclosed recoveries of 88% at Sunrise Energy Metals’ Syerston project and 70%–80% at Scandium International’s Nyngan project, and said it could not identify a higher published scandium recovery from a listed company.
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