ABx Mining (ASX:ABX) says the latest round of testwork undertaken by its 83%-owned ALCORE subsidiary has achieved up to 93% recoveries of fluorine.
The results were returned from a series of recent test runs on samples using ALCORE’s bath pilot batch reactor.
ABx says the tests confirm the “highest fluorine recoveries achieved to date”, having surpassed the previous maximum of 88%.
The goal was to recover fluorine from “excess bath”, which is an aluminium smelter waste, to produce hydrogen fluoride. The tests involved about 10kg of bath and sulfuric acid.
Fluorine recovery has been steadily increasing, with ALCORE having previously reached 80% in a single stage, and 88% with further processing.
Managing Director Mark Cooksey says achieving over 90% fluorine recovery in the latest test runs is a significant breakthrough for ALCORE, and is a result of the sustained, high-level chemical engineering development conducted by the team.
“The results give us even more confidence that the process will perform as planned at commercial scale,” he says.
At commercial scale, a proportion of the hydrogen fluoride will be further processed to produce aluminium fluoride – a high-value chemical essential for aluminium smelting that is currently fully imported.
ABx says the solid product from these test runs is representative of the likely solid product from a future commercial plant.
This means studies of applications for and further processing of the solid product can be expanded.
The reactor, which is operating at the ALCORE Technology Centre on the New South Wales Central Coast, was commissioned in October 2023.
ALCORE now plans to use the latest results to refine the continuous pilot plant reactor configuration design and tune the operating conditions. The company anticipates that a slightly higher conversion will be achieved due to the larger scale and optimised equipment design.
ABx, which has a market capitalisation of $12.5 million, last week released a baseline environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report as it works to improve its ESG metrics.
Besides its plan to establish a plant to produce hydrogen fluoride and aluminium fluoride from recycled industrial waste, the company is also focused on developing a rare earths project, to enable the increased production of permanent magnets that are essential for renewable energy generation.
Write to Angela East at Mining.com.au
Images: ABx Group
