Downstream Processing

Rare Earth Processing Plant (REPP) Project

Pursuant to the Medallion Licensing Agreement, the Company has an exclusive licence to the MMP technology to pursue a downstream processing route for the extraction of REE from monazite produced by the Company.

The Medallion Monazite Process (MMP) is a chemical process developed by Medallion, which enables safe, scalable and sustainable extraction of rare earth elements (REE) from mineral sand monazite.

The MMP is an updated and modernised version of the commercially established caustic crack and acid leach process employed on monazite sand. MMP aims to provide an efficient solution to convert monazite sand into a mixed REE concentrate, whilst enabling the valorisation of the by-product phosphate, controlled management of radio-nuclides and quantitatively reducing the required energy input.

The MMP has been developed to be:

• scalable, to ensure the deployment can accommodate resource growth;
• extensible, to ensure the process can be customised and augmented based on the requirements imposed by the deployment site;
• automated, to reduce operator exposure to a challenging work environment and operate an economically-lean workforce; and
• modular, in support of both the scalable and extensible design objectives, a modular approach has been adopted for expansion and customisation of the process.

The MMP is supported by repeated positive test results at a laboratory scale and multiple components have been tested together. It is now at a pre-piloting stage.

Further work is required in order to validate and verify the MMP process to a level necessary to support application at a commercial scale. As such, the Company has planned test work programs based on materials sourced from the Projects and other third-party sources to further characterise waste streams, recycling potential, and to assess any potential energy or environmental efficiency improvements.

The MMP seeks to produce mixed REE oxide, which is a marketable product and which is also suitable to be directly fed into a separation circuit.