TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Montreal-based rare earth elements (REEs) development company Geomega Resources on Wednesday announced conclusive benchmark results confirming that its proprietary technology can physically separate REEs from a commercial mixed concentrate.

The company said that the objective of the test was to address the complexities of separating the constituent elements of a mixture bought on the open commercial market, including to test the behaviour of impurities and to set a benchmark for future developments.

The results proved that a laboratory-scale prototype plant could simultaneously separate REEs, including heavy REEs and impurities, in a single-step process, without any pretreatment of the REE concentrate.

Geomega president and CEO Simon Britt told Mining Weekly Online that the true significance of the test results was that the process did not use solvents to extract REE.

He said that if the operating and capital numbers of the final engineering design were competitive with what it costs to produce REEs in China, their process would render solvent extraction obsolete.

China accounted for about 95% of the global supply of REEs in 2012, and outside of China, the world does not have significant alternative supply sources of REEs should China decide to impose export restrictions on the minerals, which are generally used to make permanent magnets, metal alloys and consumer electronics.

“A successful scale-up commercially would mean no supply risk of REEs, which is currently restraining the clean-energy industry,” he said.

Geomega’s proprietary physical separation process has the potential to reduce the capital required to build separation facilities when compared with conventional techniques such as fractional precipitation, ion exchange and solvent extraction, to optimise REE recoveries and mitigate environmental impacts.

The company said that it intended to use the same REE concentrate for optimisation testing until the initial scale-up parameters had been set. Subsequently, testing would be performed with the most recent concentrate from Geomega’s own northern Quebec-based Montviel REE project.

“Results show excellent simultaneous separation after one separation step without any recirculation. The number of steps required to purify all REE would be significantly less than the hundreds of steps currently required in solvent extraction.

“The efforts now shift towards increasing the concentration during the optimisation tests, which is scheduled to begin in June and expected to take up to six months,” Britt said.

Geomega’s development partner, biopolymers and bioparticles research firm FFE Service, based in Munich, Germany, under the leadership of Dr Gerhard Weber, performed the test. The company conducted all assays at the National Research Council Canada laboratory, in Boucherville, Canada.

VALUE IN SEPARATION

The selling price of a mixed REE concentrate depends mainly on the REE elemental distribution and the nature of impurities.

However, a concentrate with an excellent REE distribution is not always ready to move down the supply chain since further elemental or alloy processing requires high-purity individual REEs.

For that reason, the value of the REE in a mixed concentrate is between 25% to a 100% less than those in pure form. The difference in market value between the mixed form and refined form of an individual REE is also affected by the supply risk, required purity imposed by end-products and separation cost. As a result, having access to a REE refinery facility gives an enormous advantage to any REE producer, instead of just relying on selling the low-priced mixed concentrate.

TAKEOVER TALK

Last week Friday, Geomega adopted a poison pill, or shareholders rights plan, which is designed to provide the board and the shareholders more time to consider any unsolicited take-over bid for Geomega, before certain rights become effective.

The company on Friday said that it did not implement the plan in light of any particular takeover bid, but investor speculation is rife that with the proven-up technology, a takeover offer from a larger REE rival such as US-based Molycorp, or Australia-based Lynas Corp is potentially on the way.

Britt on Wednesday dispelled the takeover talk as purely speculative, saying the poison pill was adopted as a measure of good governance. He did concede though that the company’s overarching strategy is to maximise shareholder value, and a buyout is but one option to achieve it.

Britt added that the company is currently in discussion with potential REE offtake partners, but not for a buyout of the company.

Geomega’s TSX-V-listed stock on Wednesday trended downwards in morning trade, giving back 14.75% to change hands at C$0.52 apiece. Since the start of the year, the stock had gained 510% in value.