London South East spoke to Rainbow Rare Earths' (RBW) CEO George Bennett after the company announced that a groundbreaking chemical Flowsheet process to extract rare earths from the gypsum stacks at Phalaborwa had been achieved.
Rainbow and K-Tech have developed a process, underpinned by comprehensive test work, to finesse the extraction process involving the application of K-Technologies IP and extensive testing at the ANSTO laboratory in Sydney. Now George Bennett has announced with confidence they can extract up to 65% of rare earths from their raw material stacks and they are ready top proceed with the development of a pilot plant.
"It's crucial to do sufficient chemical processing development work at this stage" said George. "I've been involved in the development of 22 mines in Africa and that experience tells me those who don't do enough development work, it bites them later in the project. I'm making sure we don't make the same mistake at Rainbow. This is critical because this is basically a chemical processing plant that we will be building."
"We've now got a flow sheet which has been proven at lab scale, our next stage will be doing continuous laboratory testing of the process to further confirm the Flowsheet, then at Phalaborwa itself we are going to build a large scale pilot plant to do continuous bulk piloting to give our shareholders confidence that it will indeed produce guaranteed results."
• Rainbow Rare Earths are the London-listed producer of Rare Earth metals with a development project extracting rare earths from gypsumstacks at Phalaborwa, South Africa and a pilot mine in Burundi.
• RBW are leading the drive towards production of high quality and high value rare earth oxides outside China.
• Nd and Pr are used to make permanent magnets, whilst Tb and Dy allow permanent magnets to hold their magnetic strength at high temperatures.
Rainbow Rare Earths (RBW)