Image Resources has found a silver lining in unforeseen delays caused by a labour shortage, revealing it has used the extra time to consider adding a mineral separation plant to its Bidaminna mineral sands project.
The company says the delays have slowed its prefeasibility study for Bidaminna, but also allowed it to assess the potential production of only a heavy mineral concentrate at the operation, with positive results.
The Bidaminna project is located 120km north of Perth and forms part of Image’s multi-decade mine-life extensions to its existing Boonanarring mineral sands operation in the area.
The mineral sands producer says while the early indicators of the study show the economic benefits of a heavy mineral concentrate-only model, the incorporation of the mineral separation plant appears to provide important operational and strategic advantages.
Image says the purpose of the plant would be to separate heavy mineral concentrate at the site into final products of zircon, rutile, ilmenite, leucoxene and the rare earths by-product, monazite. It says one of the plant’s major benefits would be the opportunity to sell individual products to potential buyers both locally and globally.
Management believes the addition of the plant could also produce a high-quality ilmenite as potential feedstock for upgrading the product to the synthetic rutile that opens up a new market as a supplier to domestic and international producers.
Bidaminna is also being evaluated as a standalone, greenfield mineral sands project amenable to low-cost dredge mining, with a floating wet concentration plant to recover heavy mineral concentrate for sale or separation into final products. Image believes the results of the prefeasibility study will soon be completed.
Just last month, the company upgraded its Bidaminna mineral sands project with a 7 per cent increase in JORC resources to 109 million tonnes and a whopping 15 per cent increase in grade to 2.5 per cent total heavy minerals.
The percentage of valuable heavy minerals remains unchanged at 93 per cent of the operation’s total. However, individual mineral percentages have changed with ilmenite rising to 72 per cent of the total heavy minerals, while the combined zircon and rutile content dropped marginally to 8.9 per cent and leucoxene fell to 12 per cent.
Its existing mineral sands operations near Bidaminna produced 177,200 tonnes of heavy mineral concentrate for the 2022 calendar year. In December last year, the company announced an updated mineral resource for the high-grade Atlas heavy minerals deposit of 5.5 million tonnes at 9.4 per cent total heavy minerals, with mineral assemblages including 11.9 per cent zircon and 7.9 per cent rutile.
Image has 12 heavy mineral sands deposits with Boonanarring in the south the first to be mined and the remaining ore reserves at the site expected to be depleted by the middle of this year. The wet concentrator plant will then be relocated to Atlas.
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