“We have completed the $1.9 million pilot plant. We are just finishing off our optimization and what we are looking for is again to tweak those capital costs and get the operating cost down. Our next step then will be to build a demonstration plant and we are hoping to initiate that and we are looking at doing about a 1/100 scale of that. The key thing there again is to be able to deliver more products for the refineries to go further down and get into those offtake discussions that are quite needed now. Our quantities on a 1000 tons per day will about 3200 tons of mixed rare earths (per year). It is mixed rare earths concentrate right now but we can change that to be the chlorides or whatever we need in our process to suit the market.” States Greg Andrews, President, CEO and Director of Search Minerals Inc. (TSXV: SMY), in an interview with InvestorIntel’s Jack Lifton.
Greg went on to say that Search Minerals has neodymium, praseodymium and a mix of dysprosium and terbium in its resource. The company will be able to produce 650 tons of neodymium-praseodymium, about 50 tons of dysprosium and 10 tons of terbium. Greg said that Search Minerals enjoys strong support from the provincial and federal government and has received funding from both for its pilot plant.
Search Mineral participated in the request for information to the US in July and the company qualifies to be considered a domestic rare earths supply source for the US. Greg also provided an update on Search Minerals’ Direct Extraction technology. The scalable technology eliminates the grinding and wet flotation stages which help to significantly reduces CAPEX and operational costs.
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Disclaimer: Search Minerals Inc. is an advertorial member of InvestorIntel Corp.
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