By
Byron King |
October 3, 2011 |
I’ll kept this short, but I have some great news for you concerning Ucore Rare Metals (UCU: TSX-V) .
Ever since I returned from visiting the Ucore rare earth (RE) site
at Bokan Mountain, Alaska, I’ve been waiting for the word about the engineering and chemistry that’s necessary to turn rock from the ground into a useable RE product. That’s the key to making Ucore a success.
Well, I just received word from Ucore. The Hazen Laboratory, in Denver, has completed and released the Phase I work, and it’s evident that Ucore CAN extract heavy RE materials form its ore. This is wonderful news!
Hazen extracted 85-90% of the RE elements in a representative sample of the expected mine output. The results also include significant Yttrium, which is not technically a RE but which is part of the monetary value of the ore.
The Hazen results meet and exceed previous work conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s by the former US Bureau of Mines (G.K. Green and D.D. Harbuck, Yttrium Recovery from Bokan Mountain, Alaska, Minerals and Mineral Processing, February 1995).
The technical procedures are quite doable and well understood, which means that it’s safe to say that the process risk is relatively low (for RE!).
Basically, the Hazen procedure began with a “size reduction” of the sample, followed by sulfuric acid-bake and then water leaching of the baked sample.
There’s been some skepticism over using sulfuric acid as the primary reagent. To give the devil his due, yes you can dissolve anything if you add enough acid. But the Hazen technique was successful at relatively low levels of acid usage.
The end result of these experiments is a RE-rich raw material that will then undergo further refining, to extract the individual elements.
This news from Hazen now gives Ucore both credibility and currency to attract partners from the mid-stream and down-stream user community.
Success brings success. This particular achievement moves Ucore ahead in the game by many steps. That is, Ucore has a great ore body, as I’ve described before. Now it has a solid, validated chemical basis for the downstream metallurgy.
I’ll find out more about the Hazen work, but I wanted to let you know this important news.
In the meantime, I’ve had a couple people ask me why I’m so focused on Ucore and Stans Energy (HRE: TSX-V) . Well, this is why. Here are two companies that have bragging rights to the metallurgy that’s necessary to make the whole thing work.
If you can’t turn the ore into something useful downstream, you’re just in the sand and gravel biz. Ucore and Stans are both doing well in the chemistry side of things.
That’s all for now. Have a good week.
Best wishes
