Project development company, Neometals Ltd, has announced the completion of the continuous pilot trial for its vanadium recovery project (VRP).
The trials, which were undertaken at a commercial laboratory in Perth, Western Australia, processed approximately 14 tonnes of vanadium-bearing steel by-product (Slag) over 24 days from three Scandinavian steel mills.
According the company’s statement, results confirmed excellent vanadium chemical product purity consistently higher that 99.5% and recoveries exceeding 75% for its patent pending hydrometallurgical process for recovering vanadium from Slag.
Earlier this year, Neometals executed a collaboration agreement with Critical Metals to jointly evaluate the feasibility of constructing a facility to recover and process high-grade vanadium products from Slag generated by steel producer SSAB in Scandinavia.
Neometals Managing Director Chris Reed said the pilot campaign provided the company with confidence and data to commence the feasibility study which is to be delivered to SSAB by 30 June 2022.
“We are very pleased to confirm, at scale, the exceptional product purities and recoveries from our proprietary, carbon sequestering, vanadium recovery process,” Mr Reed said.
“Data from the Pilot will now feed into our Feasibility Study to confirm potential lowest-quartile operating costs and leading capital cost estimates from the earlier PFS.
“The Pilot has significantly de-risked the project enabling the acceleration of commercial offtake discussions, reagent sourcing and approvals processes for the development of the project at the Port of Pori, Finland.”
