I met with Nick Hazen and Christel Bemelmans (one of the head metallurgists at Hazen) on Wednesday August 21 here in Vancouver and they informed me that they would begin the upgrading process for our fluorite concentrate that is produced as one of two products from the Wet High Intensity Magnetic Separation (WHIMS), while the other is our REE concentrate.
Nick informed me that they would work in parallel on the 12 kilos of fluorite concentrate they had from the previous operation of the pilot plant, as well as starting from scratch to see if they could also improve the recoveries by column flotation, over what had been achieved back during the previous pilot plant operation - which were quite good, but as metallurgists, they are always looking for ways to optimize.
When I sat down with Glencore in Toronto in June, they informed me that China had become a net importer and that they were again possibly interested in an investment with us, with the caveat that they would still like to receive a representative sample of what we could produce in terms of an acid grade fluorspar sample.
The Ashram, with the current production scenario of 4,000 tonnes of extraction per day, with approximately 8% of the deposit being fluorite, would be the 2nd largest producer of fluorspar in the world, while also producing just under 17,000 tonnes of REO.
It is this fluorspar that Glencore is very interested in, and I will keep you posted as this develops.
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