Dec 13 2012
Eagle Star Minerals Corp. ("Eagle Star" or "the Company") is pleased to announce it has been successful in claiming additional areas to the north portion of its Canabrava block where the company has identified though detailed mapping an extension of the 15 km mineralized package previously announced (July 25th, 2012).
The mineralized package now extends over 30 kilometers along strike with an average thickness of 7 meters bearing thin to no overburden.
Drilling to quantify this significant mineralization will commence as soon as the mineral technological tests are concluded and a preliminary beneficiation flow chart is developed.
The phosphate mineralized package is highly exposed at surface and extremely stratified. These characteristics combined with detailed geological mapping (1:50,000), systematic channel sampling and utilization of a genetic model developed in house by Eagle Star's own technical team enables the Company to reliably estimate that the extent of mineralization along strike is very significant.
Due to the wide geographic distribution of the Canabrava block, it has been decided to divide exploration work into 3 sub areas - Canabrava 1 ("CB-1"), Canabrava 2 ("CB-2"), and Canabrava 3 ("CB-3"). The above mentioned 30km long phosphate mineralized package occurs at CB-1. Similar phosphate mineralized packages have also been observed at CB-2 and CB-3 but these areas have yet to be mapped in detail.
The source of phosphorous is associated to the granite and alkaline rocks of the Borborema Province. The exposure of the mineralization depends on the erosional level and the geomorphologic and structural controls.
In general, the exposure of phosphate mineralization occurs in two forms: 1) over hillsides and 2) over plateaus. The mineralized package exhibits no overburden on the hillsides while in the plateau areas it is likely to have either no or a very thin (< 5 meters) overburden that preserves the mineralized package (up to 10 meters) from erosion.
Eagle Star is now focused on advancing the mineral technological tests and development of a metallurgical flow chart with the intent of finding the most economic and efficient beneficiation process for the phosphate ore. So far, the solubility tests of representative samples of the concentrated material (sandstone grading 4-6%) in both hydrochloric and citric acids confirm that fluorapatite is the major phosphorous containing mineral with solubility of phosphorus and calcium ranging from 87 to 96%. The results also indicate that the fluorapatite represents more than 10% of the mineralogy model while calcination tests excluded the presence of any secondary phosphates. The test concerning recovery of fluorapatite concentrate (densimetric separation with heavy liquids) also returned excellent values between 76 and 83%. Finally, preliminary densimetric separation processes also showed very positive signs for recoveries of the material through which the phosphate was upgraded by over 100% from 3.6% to 8.26% P2O5.
Lino Freitas, a Metallurgic Engineer with over 35 years experience in the field, 25 years of which spent in the Vale Center of Technology, will be working on developing the beneficiation flow chart for the Canabrava Block. He is to work alongside Carlos Perucca, a Director of the Company and a Mineral Processing Engineer, with 25 years experience of working on phosphate projects for top tier companies including AMEC and Agrium.
Source: http://eaglestarminerals.com/