GREY:PLUUF - Post by User
Comment by
Y93H1979on Jul 19, 2019 10:31pm
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Post# 29942269
RE:RE:Met work
RE:RE:Met workI've been wondering about the increased acid consumption versus the previous estimate of 150 kg/tonne. I mean, this is more than double the acid! The reasons I can think of are that the inital tests were done on the "bench", ie small scale under ideal laboratory conditions and mixing rates etc. Scaling up to an industrial sized application, mixing large tonnages of ore is not going to be the same as the lab environment. They also report a 90% yield from the leach process, which is an upgrade from the initail estimates (around 10% increase I think).
According to the resource estimation technical report, H2SO4 is $100 per tonne, so this is a roughly $20 increase in procesing cost per tonne of ore.
Considering a LiCO3 price of $12,000/tonne, we are looking at around $200 rock (per tonne). So an increase of 10% recovery into the leach solution would be around a $20 gain. Perhaps this factored into their decision to use a higher acid concentration, in addition to potential advantages in leach times etc.