High vanadium recoveries from King River’s Speewah ores
Date: Oct 17, 2018
ASX listed vanadium developer King River Copper is firing on several fronts, as it seeks to identify the optimal and most commercially practical ore processing route for its mammoth Speewah vanadium-titanium-iron project in the east Kimberley region of WA.
The company reported this week that bottle roll leach test work on magnetite concentrates from Speewah, produced high leach efficiencies that extracted 92% of the contained vanadium, 76% of the iron and 19% of the titanium, after a 58-day cycle of sulphuric acid leaching.
According to King River, although leach rates for vanadium and iron had plateaued after 58 days, the rate of titanium leaching had actually picked up over time.
These initial bottle roll tests will provide baseline data and lead to more definitive metal recoveries using different sample masses and crush sizes for the ores.
The test work is expected to continue throughout October.
King River is also undertaking further laboratory-based leach test work of its ores using two further methods.
One method uses a hydrochloric acid leach to produce a commercial-grade +98% vanadium pentoxide flake product, using a modified version of the traditional AMV process route.
Results were very encouraging, with test work extracting up to 99.1% of the contained vanadium, nearly 89% of the titanium and up to 96.4% of the contained iron in the original sample.
A second method used a sulphuric acid leach for the flake test work stream, but metal recoveries were lower overall.
The company is conducting these diverse metallurgical test studies with the aim of assessing which processing routes, or alternatively combinations of routes, prove the most prudent to develop the ore deposits
King River owns the largest defined vanadium mineral resource on the planet at Speewah, which contains 4.712 billion tonnes grading 0.3% vanadium pentoxide, 2% titanium and 14.7% iron.
The company is very focussed on maximising the key variables of the Speewah deposits, which outcrop at surface and are 80m thick, 1-2km wide and have very low strip ratios for future open pit mining extraction.
