HAT is NON-LATERITE...Importance"Considerable amounts of Sc could be recovered from accumulated tailings and other mining waste materials. However, direct leaching of Sc from these materials with strong acids results in the dissolution of a variety of impurities into the pregnant leach solution (PLS). For instance in bauxite residue, Sc is reported to be closely associated with Fe and full leaching of Sc is only possible after dissolving all of the Fe (Borra et al., 2015). To suppress this interference selective leaching with phosphoric acid is suggested (Deng et al., 2017). The presence of trace amount of Sc (mg/L range) in the PLSs obtained from leaching secondary source materials alongside orders of magnitude higher concentrations of contaminants such as Al and Fe (g/L range) makes traditional separation techniques such as co-precipitation (Yagmurlu et al., 2017) and solvent extraction (Wang and Cheng, 2011) either not effective or very complicated and expensive. "
from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0892687521003204
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HAT/DBG unlike laterites such as bauxite,tungsten, coal and others will NOT have the problem/cost of dealing with Fe/Al/Ti impurities in tailings as descibed above. The precipitation using phophoric acid will only have to deal with forming the scandium phosphate which will then lead to ScF3. Without the problem of impurities, lower temperature can be used and less acid strength, therefore lower initial capital cost and annual processing mining cost . DBG metallurgy people have shown why DBG/HAT-non-pyrite will be economically feasible where others have failed. The best part is that it comes from the waste tailings after mining the ore for AU,CU and Co Listen carefully to the presentation and reread all news releases.