- Imperial Mining Group Ltd. (IPG) has announced early results from its Crater Lake Development Project
- Previously-announced process flowsheet optimization work shows significantly improved scandium and rare earth recoveries relative to previous reported results
- The company also said exploration crews have now mobilized to the Crater Lake property to begin the planned summer work
- Imperial Mining is also undertaking a hydrometallurgical flowsheet optimization program, which is based off the company’s patent-pending two-stage hydrometallurgical method to extract scandium and rate earth elements with SGS Canada
- Shares of Imperial Mining are unchanged at C$0.07
Imperial Mining Group (IPG) announced early results from its Crater Lake Development Project.
In a press release, the company said previously announced process flowsheet optimization work shows significantly improved scandium and rare earth recoveries that are similar to previous results.
Optimization work to date has shown an 11 per cent improvement, up to 96 per cent from 85 per cent, in scandium recovery at the leaching stage when compared to the initial lab results. Similarly, optimization of the rare earths increased by 10 per cent, from 84 per cent to 94 per cent.
“The much-improved recoveries reported from the current optimization work will significantly impact the financial model reported in our PEA announcement last month,” Peter J Cashin, Imperial Mining’s president & CEO, said in a press release. “Even more encouraging is the fact that the recovery improvements were obtained from scale-up of our metallurgical process when compared to our initial lab-scale test results reported in 2020. We continue our optimization work further reduce the operating risk presented by our PEA last month.”
The company also said that exploration crews have now entered the Crater Lake property to begin planned summer work at Crater Lake.
According to the announcement, Imperial Mining is also conducting a hydrometallurgical flowsheet optimization development program, which is based on the company’s patent-pending two-stage hydrometallurgical method for extracting scandium and rate earth elements with SGS Canada.
This program is partly funded by a $245,355 grant from the Quebec Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources and is focused on several key objectives including:
- Continued optimization of the mineral processing flowsheet by reflecting olivine, a non-scandium/REE-bearing mineral
- Bulk processing of olivine-depleted Sc/REE mineral concentrate through the company’s patent-pending hydrometallurgical processes
- This will generate sufficient primary leach solution to optimize the scandium/REE recovery circuits of the flowsheet
Moving forward into the rest of the year, the company said it will be doing the work required to move the Crater Lake scandium-rare earth project towards Definitive Feasibility studies, which will include a 2,500-meter in-fill diamond drill program for the current resource at the TG Zone Northern Lobe.
Shares of Imperial Mining are unchanged at C$0.07.