Australian heavy rare earths producer Northern Minerals Limited (ASX: NTU) has updated shareholders on the Company’s current corporate and project development activities.
The Company’s Browns Range Heavy Rare Earth project, located in the heart of Western Australia’s remote Kimberley region, remains the only project that has successfully exported a commercial quantity of heavy rare earths outside of China, when it initially commenced production of a mixed heavy rare earth carbonate in 2018.
The R&D testwork recommenced in August 2020, with the partial restart of operations following a five-month disruption due to Commonwealth biosecurity measures in response to COVID-19, which required the plant to be placed into care and maintenance.
Northern Minerals chief executive officer Mark Tory said beneficiation testwork on Browns Range ore was continuing, and Northern Minerals planned to restart the hydrometallurgical plant testwork in the December quarter as part of the three-year pilot assessment of the economic and technical feasibility of a commercial, larger scale development at Browns Range extracting rare earths from hard rock xenotime ore.
Exploration
Northern Minerals is finalising plans for an exploration program to drill approximately 16,500 metres across its Browns Range tenements before the end of June 2021.
The Company has allocated a budget of up $5 million for the program in Financial Year 2021 and anticipates drill rigs being mobilised to site in October to test greenfields targets across the tenement holding as well as follow-up on previous drilling at the Dazzler and Banshee deposits.
The exploration program is focused on increasing the Mineral Resource and the life of mine potential at Browns Range. These results, along with the findings from Pilot Plant testwork, will feed into a new feasibility study to evaluate the potential for a commercial, larger scale heavy rare earths production project in the Kimberley.
Mr Tory said,“This significant commitment to exploration in the next 12 months will underpin the Company’s ongoing ambition to realise the potential of Browns Range beyond the Pilot Plant Project, which if successful would create significantly greater opportunities for the Company, the State and Australia in the global context of producing these critical, strategic minerals within our borders,”
“Northern Minerals’ 2,381km2 land holding in the Kimberley is either 100% owned or the Company has acquired 100% rights to rare earth minerals extraction from tenements covering the Browns Range Dome geological feature.
“Our exploration team has identified numerous high priority targets, buoyed by the recent discovery at Dazzler that confirmed the prospectivity of the area and are specifically targeting mineralisation associated with the unconformity.
“Finding Dazzler lookalikes will be a priority for exploration for the next 12 months, as its grades are up to 3-times the total Browns Range resource grade. If we can find a few more of these it will help us realise the current strategy to increase mine life to 20-plus years.
