There was already plenty of interest in Ucore Rare Metals’ Bokan Dotson-Ridge project in southeast Alaska, prior to a potentially huge leap forward in metallurgical testing last week.
Bokan is a rare earth element project in a remote location renowned for environmental scrutiny, it is the highest grade heavy rare earth element (HREE) resource in the US and it potentially has US$145 million of state backing behind it should it reach the build phase.
These factors meant it was worth, at least, a cursory glance.
With a 43% internal rate of return, a 2.3 year payback period, modest capital expenditure of US$221 million and a net present value of US$577 million at a 10% discount rate from a preliminary economic assessment (PEA), it also stood out from a project economics standpoint.
But it is now about to get a lot more attention.
It recently revealed positive tests on Bokan pregnant leach solution (PLS) from a Nobel Prize-winning process called molecular recognition technology (MRT), which produced a “near quantitative separation of a heavy rare PLS,” according to Ucore.
The production of a high purity heavy rare earth concentrate is “the key and critical first step in the production, by separation, of individual high purity heavy rare earth salts,” according to Ucore.
“The resultant salts can be utilised to readily generate output products tailored to customer specifications. Those products include oxides, carbonates, nitrates and other salts of each of the individual rare earth elements,” it said.
This is such a big deal, as, up until now, such separation and concentration had only been possible through solvent extraction (SX) methods, which were costly and time-consuming. Also, outside of China, SX employed in rare earth operations, brought with it many negative environmental connotations, making it hard for ‘western’ firms to get permission to process material through such means.
Ucore had considered a “nano-technology” from the pharmaceutical industry broadly referred to as solid phase extraction (SPE) previously back in 2012, but recognised “there was significant risk associated with scalability and commercialisation simply because SPE had no track record in the mining industry,” Jim McKenzie, president and chief executive of Ucore, toldMining Journal.
“MRT already had substantial success and has actually been commercialised in numerous metal separation operations around the globe. The adaptation of ‘MRT’ to the rare earth industry would be relatively simple and because it was proven to be scalable it would significantly reduce risk in our development plan,” he said.
The company was still pretty bold in proposing the use of a technology in a new commodity space though.
McKenzie, an entrepreneur with 25 years of private and public company experience, has assembled quite a team for developing Bokan.
It is full of mining and processing experience, including chief operating officer (COO) Ken Collison a mining engineer by trade and former COO of Thompson Creek Metals, Ed Bentzen, acting for Ucore on behalf of engineering contracting firm Lyntek and a mineral processing engineer in his own right, and independent consultant and rare earth expert Jack Lifton.
This experience, inevitably, gave the company the confidence to move ahead with such a project.
Arguably, Ucore has greater motivation than most rare earth developers to push through such progressive technology though.
Bokan is one of the few deposits outside of China hosting a substantial amount of HREE.
In total, the resource includes 40% of heavy rare earth oxides (HREO), according to a recent Ucore presentation.
For comparison, Avalon Metals’ Thor Lake deposit has 16% HREO, Lynas’ Mt Weld has 5%, Rare Element Resources’ Bear Lodge project has 4% and Molycorp’s Mountain Pass mine in California hosts 1%, it said.
This means Ucore’s project could be globally significant if it can devise a strategy for using the MRT technology and separating the HREE.
But, opening this out further, if Ucore and IBC Advanced Technologies of Utah in the US, which developed the process, is able to prove it commercially; it could open up a whole raft of projects previously considered sub-optimal or environmentally invasive.
McKenzie said as much to Mining Journal.
“The framework of the technology is very attractive compared with legacy SX operations. It is clean, fast and simple from an operational standpoint. This translates into savings across the board from dramatically reduced energy consumption to the very efficient use of reagents.
“This technology has the potential to transform the rare earth industry outside China in the way that photography was impacted by the introduction of digital cameras. At first, the established industry refused the technology as being below standard. Then, almost immediately, the film industry vanished in a cloud of logic,” he said.
The technology is already used throughout the precious and base metals space where powerful ‘selectivity attributes’ are utilised.
Impala Platinum uses MRT to extract palladium, while both Asarco and South Korea’s LS Nikko use it to get clean copper products, according to IBC. Other refineries also use the process to extract gold from concentrate effectively.
Put simply, the technology is “simple, efficient and green”, according to McKenzie.
Specifically, it is a highly selective, non-ion exchange process using specially designed organic chelating agents or ligands, which separate targeted elements.
The process in the case of REEs involves feeding a pregnant solution through columns and filling said columns with IBC’s SuperLig particles to selectively extract rare earths from the solution.
After the PLS solution is fed through a column and SuperLigs are loaded, the REEs remain in the column and the raffinate exits.
A weak acidic solution is then added to elute the REE from the column with the process yielding a concentrate exceeding 99% purity in the case of Bokan.
Without a commercial HREE installation, IBC will have to go some way to prove its viability to the wider world.
This could come sooner than people might expect.
“Ucore is currently testing the application of MRT for the separation of individual rare earth oxides. This testing is expected to lead to the construction of a mini plant to provide the separation function for our pilot plant operation already under development at Hazen Research in Golden, Colorado. Bokan-Dotson Ridge sourced ore will provide the feedstock and the pilot plant aims to deliver a full suite of separated oxides or salts,” McKenzie said.
Further down the line, McKenzie is sure the implementation of an MRT processing line, will prove beneficial for the project’s economics.
“Initial estimates indicate that the capital expenditure required for implementation of the MRT circuit at Bokan will be lower than the original separation plant designed for our preliminary economic assessment to employ SPE.
“We have investigated the separation process using SX, tolling and even considered the work currently being done with rapid SX. In our opinion, MRT will unlock tremendous value in the Bokan-Dotson Ridge deposit well beyond any current separation technique.”
And, should MRT at Bokan prove successful, long-term, there could be significant changes downstream for medical imaging equipment, wind turbines, car parts, phones, laptops and other smart devices, which will use permanent magnets made from HREEs, according to McKenzie.
“The MRT technology could very well unlock value in the REE industry outside of China. Potential producers, as well as processors, are looking for ways to add efficiency and profit back to the sector. The performance metrics of permanent magnets, the key input of which is dysprosium and neodymium oxides, the primary product of the proposed Bokan operation, are unmatched.
“However, after the dramatic HREE price increases, there was significant reengineering employed to eliminate the requirement for neodymium iron boron (permanent) magnets. If secure supply sources outside of China become available these manufacturers would be happy to upgrade their product’s performance by using permanent magnets again.”
But McKenzie isn’t getting ahead of himself.
For now, he was focused on showing interested parties – of which there were many – an MRT plant in practice.
“Since our announcement in Singapore, the ‘fish are jumping into the boat’. As a matter of fact, our first plant tour is on Friday at an installation in Texas,” he said earlier this week.
The rare earth world is watching.