May 21 2015
Medallion Resources Ltd ("Medallion" or the "Company"), today announced that it has made significant progress on its lab-scale metallurgical testing to extract rare earths from beach sand monazite. This recent work, undertaken by the Company's Chief Technical Advisor Dr Bill Bird and a Denver-based metallurgical consultancy, confirms Medallion's caustic-route metallurgical process plans and establishes an important step toward full process refinement and commercialization.
"We've received positive results after completing a full cycle of our metallurgical process, using one of the historically successful commercial methods for rare-earth production and an available high-grade, beach-sand monazite feedstock. We're now fine tuning the process to optimize the flow sheet and operating parameters for the specific feed," said Don Lay, President & CEO. "With this initial testing complete, we remain convinced that using tried and true metallurgy, in a relatively low capital cost facility, and fed with by-product monazite, is the most viable and profitable path to new large-scale rare-earth production outside of China."
Within a few weeks, the Company expects to complete the optimization of the processing cycle. The completed test will provide Medallion with a high-purity, rare-earth chemical concentrate product and related analytical data for prospective customers and partners. Some of the more important process improvements that have resulted from testing to date include:
- Techniques for handling the waste material in the monazite feedstock,
- Opportunities for recycling of water and reagents, and
- Techniques for production of phosphate as a potential commercial fertilizer by-product of the process.
Medallion's Monazite Strategy
The mineral monazite, a rare-earth element phosphate, is the world's original rare-earth mineral source. Although found in hard rock deposits, monazite is also readily available in significant quantities as a high-grade by-product of heavy-mineral sands operations. Medallion's rare-earth production strategy is based on entering into long-term monazite supply agreements with reliable heavy-mineral sands producers. This provides for the aggregation of monazite supply streams, large-scale mine-independent extraction, and marketing of a rare-earth concentrate. Medallion is positioning itself to help satisfy a percentage of non-China demand for rare-earth elements by providing a rare-earth chemical concentrate to downstream separation processors. This approach is expected to have relatively low capital and operating costs, as it uses a high-purity, rare-earth-bearing monazite as input and a time-tested, commercially successful metallurgical process to extract the rare earths.
About Medallion Resources
Medallion Resources is focused on the opportunity for low-cost, near-term, rare-earth production by exploiting the mineral monazite. Monazite is a rare-earth phosphate that is available as a by-product from existing mining and mineral-sands sources, principally in the Indian Ocean basin. Rare earths are used in critical components for virtually all computing and mobile electronic products, as well as wind turbines, electric and hybrid vehicles, and strategic defense systems. Medallion is committed to following best practices and accepted international standards in all aspects of mineral processing and the safe management of waste materials. More about Medallion (TSX-V: MDL; OTCQB: MLLOF; Frankfurt: MRD) can be found at www.medallionresources.com.
Source: http://medallionresources.com/