Cobalt production on track for 2019By Todd Adams Challis Messenger staff writer Sep 20, 2018 Idaho Cobalt Project personnel are on schedule to start underground mining and begin producing a cobalt-copper concentrate by the third quarter of 2019, mill Superintendent D.J. Patrick told Challis senior citizens last week. Thirty-one Formation Capital Corporation, U.S. employees are working at the Idaho Cobalt Project site above Blackbird Creek in the Panther Creek drainage. More employees are based at the offices in Salmon, he said. The water treatment plant is 99 percent constructed and about half of the machinery is in place, said Corey Rice, plant process control foreman. The plant could be online within the next 40 days. Concrete for the mill's foundation was poured the week of Sept. 10, Rice said. Work has begun on water storage ponds and a dry tailings stacking area. Some Amish men from the Baker area have been building the maintenance shop at the site, Rice said.The workers are driven to and from the job site each day in a Formation Capital van. The water plant might be run this winter to make sure the process works and wont freeze up, Patrick said. The plant is designed to ensure that no water is released from the site. Since its an underground mine, the site has a small footprint -- 135 acres, Shana Hilton said. Some mill tailings will have water added to make a paste before being pumped back into the mine to backfill adits and drifts, Patrick said. Waste rock and other tailings will also be backfilled into the mine. Youre moving the rock anyway, so you might as well put it back into the hole, Rice said. Since no huge tailings piles will be created, that will limit the footprint and amount of Forest Service land under lease. After cobalt is mined underground, ore will be hauled by truck to a crusher at the mill, Patrick said. The mill will be fairly small, processing about 800 tons of ore per day in a chemical flotation separation process that will produce a copper-cobalt concentrate. That concentrate will be further refined in a hydrometallurgical facility in Blackfoot before being shipped to market by rail. Patrick, whose mining experience includes mills that process 60,000 tons of ore per day, said the smaller mill at the Idaho Cobalt Project will allow him to fine tune things so the cobalt concentrate produced is the highest quality, for use in anything with lithium ion batteries, from electric cars to smartphones. The mine has an estimated lifespan of 15 years, based on reserves identified so far, Patrick said. The ore body is vast and rich, Hilton said. Exploratory drilling has discovered only a small fraction of the reserves of cobalt ore thought to be at the mine site. The mines feasibility study that estimates a 15-year lifespan was based on 7 percent of the Idaho Cobalt Project property, she said.