Resource Development Group (ASX:RDG) will continue to export bulk shipments of Fine Mineral Concentrate (FMC) and its more valuable non-magnetic products, which it hopes to start exporting sometime in 2025.
Updating the market on its Lucky Bay Garnet operations, Resource Development reports the new rotary kiln HMC1 dryer was installed and commissioned during the last week at its Lucky Bay mine site, which is owned and operated by its wholly owned subsidiary, Australian Garnet.
The company made a shipment of just over 7,500 tonnes of FMC to a customer in China during September. FMC is produced at the Lucky Bay plant and was transported to a leased storage facility in Geraldton, from where it was subsequently loaded onto a vessel destined for the Chinese customer.
This was the second of such shipments to that customer with the first occurring in December 2023, of a much smaller volume. Due to the relatively larger size of the most recent parcel, gross revenue of $1.8 million was realised.
Resource Development will continue to export FMC bulk shipments and non-mag products, starting sometime next year.
The company says a decision was made over eight months ago to invest in a larger capacity dryer, with the original dryer to remain as a standby dryer for future expansion and a backup to the new dryer during periods of routine maintenance.
The new dryer has been designed and manufactured by Consep Engineering in New South Wales, with an operating capacity of 40 tonnes per hour and currently operating on diesel fuel, although has been designed to run on liquified natural gas (LNG) in the future.
The commissioning of the new dryer will remove the bottleneck in the plant, significantly increase garnet production and provide increased tonnes of garnet to our customers.
Resource Development has the option to consider installing a gas storage facility onsite to run the dryer on gas in the future, given how much “cleaner” gas is compared to diesel.
The company is focused on having a sustainable mine site and to this end the Lucky Bay Wind Farm (Wind Farm) has seven 600kwh wind turbines that provide power to the process plant power grid, deferring a significant quantity of diesel consumption and lowering the site’s overall greenhouse emissions.
Resource Development has also been upgrading parts of its processing plant to improve heavy mineral (HM) recoveries and enable higher throughput. These upgrades are now largely complete, and the company looks forward to increased production and sales revenue.
Australian Garnet products contain single-sourced Australian beach alluvial garnet of the highest specification which are now exported across the world. Global demand for garnet products remains strong and the company is seeking to capitalise on this as production increases at its Lucky Bay plant.
Lucky Bay is located some 530km north of Perth and 35km south of Kalbarri. It comprises the Menari and Menari North Heavy Minerals deposits and the project area is north of GMA Garnet Group’s existing garnet operation, which is the world’s largest supplier of high-quality alluvial garnet and have successfully been in operation for the past 40 years.
Write to Adam Orlando at Mining.com.au
Images: Resource Development
