PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Rare earths developer Vital Metals on Friday announced it would redesign the North T pit at its Nechalacho rare earths project, in Canada, after a five-month maiden mining campaign in 2021.

The company told shareholders that the ore sorter at Nechalancho had proven more capable of sorting lower grade ore than expected, allowing Vital to process significant quantities of material previously identified as waste.

“We are very pleased to report that the 2021 mining campaign was successfully completed with over two years production worth of ore mined whilst incurring no lost time nor environmental incidents. To achieve this during the middle of a pandemic with its associated restrictions on travel and other operational matters is a testament to the entire Vital team and one which everyone should be extremely proud of,” said Vital MD Geoff Atkins.

“The completion of this first mining and ore sorting campaign represents an important milestone in Vital’s vision of guaranteeing feedstock to the rare earths supply chain, with the North T deposit forming the basis upon which Vital product will be qualified by end-users, enabling future expansion of operations.”

“The 58 000 t of ore mined contains approximately 11 500 t of ore previously identified within our pit design with the remaining 47 500 t previously classified as waste. This includes ore which was in the top 5 m from surface and hence excluded from the original resource and hence mine inventory, the high-grade zone in the ‘dragon’s tail’ and material which was below the resource cut-off which, during commissioning of the ore sorter, we found could be successfully sorted and is now regarded as ore which is suitable for processing. This presents a significant opportunity for increasing the quantity of rare earths to be processed from the North T deposit.

“Because we have identified all this additional material which we are now able to process, we made the decision to amend our mining campaign, so that we can redesign the pit to ensure we maximise this additional quantity of rare earths which we will mine at North T in subsequent campaigns,” Atkins said.

The redesign of the pit will be completed during the Northern summer with a follow-up mining campaign to be completed during the 2023 or 2024 summer period.