en.Wedoany.com Reported - Rainbow Rare Earths has announced that in the first half of this year, its Phalaborwa project in Limpopo Province, South Africa, continued to focus on optimizing and simplifying the process flow, aiming to enhance the plant's practical operability and reduce risks as the project moves toward commercial scale.
The London Stock Exchange-listed company is advancing the Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) for the project. Phalaborwa is planned to become the world's first project to commercially recover rare earth elements from phosphogypsum, a waste product from phosphoric acid production. Based on this technical route, the significant costs, risks, and long timelines typically associated with traditional mining projects are expected to be avoided.
In the first half of the year, the pilot plant continued to operate successfully, confirming its ability to produce commercial intermediate products. Subsequent ongoing optimization work is underway, and a solvent extraction separation process utilizing innovative rare earth separation technology is being advanced. Through pilot plant operations and testing work, Rainbow Rare Earths has optimized and simplified the process flow, with 75% of the process now entering the engineering phase of the DFS. Final optimization of the solvent extraction circuit is ongoing.
Rainbow Rare Earths has established its own specialized metallurgical and analytical laboratory in Johannesburg. The company has completed major testing work through this laboratory to optimize the capital and operating costs of the Phalaborwa process, while simplifying the process flow and improving operability. This testing approach has led to significant changes in the process flow, all of which are beneficial to the project. George Bennett, CEO of Rainbow Rare Earths, stated that the company's current focus is on integrating the solvent extraction circuit into the overall process and looks forward to providing further updates in due course. This will demonstrate that the Phalaborwa project remains a near-term producer of both light and heavy rare earths at the lowest end of the industry cost curve.
Optimization work with the company's technology partners has led to an updated process flow, further simplifying the process and enabling the direct production of a mixed rare earth feed. This will allow the feed to move from the continuous ion exchange circuit directly into the solvent extraction separation process in a more cost-effective manner, without the need to pre-produce an intermediate product. The final products from the solvent extraction circuit will be separated neodymium-praseodymium oxide and samarium-europium-gadolinium oxide (99.5% purity), as well as commercial quantities of products including dysprosium, terbium, and yttrium. These final products are expected to generate higher returns than separate intermediate products.
