Greenland Minerals and Energy is well on the road towards completing an optimisation program that will reduce capital and operating costs at its flagship Kvanefjeld rare earths project in southern Greenland.
A multi-disciplinary team of engineers from four international engineering groups have conducted onsite studies to fine tune strategies designed to simplify project construction, minimise civil earth works and reduce associated capital costs for the project.
Greenland said the engineers confirmed that construction of Kvanefjeld would be relatively straightforward with no major impediments due to a number of advantages.
These advantages include benefitting from existing infrastructure such as port and fuel storage at the nearby town of Narsaq along with the availability of local labour.
Greenland will also benefit from the availability of high‐quality construction suitable rock material on‐site that can be used for roads, culverts, plant site preparation and port construction.
In addition, the Kvanefjeld’s location in southern Greenland means the company can take advantage of the relatively mild weather to carry out year-round construction while enjoying shipping access for fuels, construction material and labour.
Greenland Minerals expects the strategies and information from the onsite studies to reduce the amount of construction effort required for the civil construction, port and plant sites.
Reports are now being prepared that will update designs and capital costs for specific areas of Kvanefjeld.
Concurrently, metallurgical studies being guided by major Chinese shareholder and strategic partner Shenghe Resources, are expected to result in significant improvements in processing efficiency that will be fed into the design updates.
This partnership has already improved the metallurgical recoveries for the project’s future ore concentrates, which could ultimately enhance the cost-structure of the operation, by simplifying downstream processing.
Earlier this month, Greenland ticked off a major milestone in the development of Kvanefjeld after completing and lodging its updated Environmental Impact Assessment for the project.
The assessment is aimed at mitigating, eliminating or minimising any negative environmental impacts throughout the life of the project, which currently has an initial mine life of 37 years.
Kvanefjeld has a resource inventory of 1.01 billion tonnes containing 11.14 million tonnes total rare earth oxides, 593 million pounds of uranium and 2.25 million tonnes of zinc.
The project is expected to be one of the largest global producers of the sought-after key magnet rare earth metals, neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium.
Excitement is building now for Greenland as they hurtle headlong towards production and all eyes will certainly be on the company when it releases updates on its capital cost reductions in the coming months.
By Matt Birney
