Impact is diversifying its portfolio with the acquisition of the advanced Lake Hope high purity alumina project near Hyden, WA, which offers a pathway to low-cost production.

Lake Hope is a globally unique deposit of finely-grained, very pure and high-grade aluminous clays in the top few metres of the dry playa lake bed with unique physical and chemical properties that allow for low-cost mining and offsite metallurgical processing via a novel and cost-disruptive acid leaching process.

Previous work has also resulted in the definition of a conceptual Exploration Target of between 2.6Mt and 4.7Mt grading 24.3% Al2O3 to 26.7% A;2O3 for contained Al2O3 of 0.63Mt to 1.25Mt though further exploration will be required to estimate a JORC compliant resource.

The deposit also remains open at depth.

Impact Minerals (ASX:IPT) will focus its immediate attention on lodging a Mining Lease Application by mid-2023 with the goal of fast-tracking Lake Hope into production to deliver high-margin end-products into a rapidly expanding global market with a forecast average price for 4N HPA (99.99% Al2O3) and related products of about US$20,000/t.

Unrivalled opportunity

“This is a watershed day for Impact Minerals and its shareholders. We believe the Lake Hope project presents an unrivalled opportunity to put the company firmly on the path to low-cost production in the rapidly expanding and high-margin HPA business,” managing director Dr Mike Jones said.

“Combining a globally unique deposit within the top few metres of a playa salt lake and a straightforward metallurgical process offers a disruptive entry into the HPA space.”

He added that the deposit was discovered by experienced geologist Roland Gotthard, whose work the company has been following for some time, and that Impact was “astounded” by Lake Hope after evaluating the project.

“We are pleased to welcome Roland on board at Impact as Project Manager to lead the company towards production from Lake Hope over the next few years,” Dr Jones added.

“We believe that the unique properties of the deposit will allow for fast-tracking of the statutory approvals process for both mining and processing, and we aim to lodge a mining lease application by mid-year.

“We will also be building out our capabilities in metallurgical processing and end-product development to cater for the specialist requirements of the end users of HPA.”

Targeting prospective salt lakes

Lake Hope consists of one granted exploration licence over the already discovered deposit as well as five further exploration licence applications covering poorly explored but highly prospective salt lakes between Hyden and Norseman in southern Western Australia.

Salt lakes in the state are well known for their unique and complex hydrogeochemistry, which has led to the formation of a wide variety of economic minerals and brines within the playa systems.

These include the world-class Yeelirrie uranium deposit (>100 Mlb U3O8), significant resources of potash brines, gypsum and lime-sand.

Lake Hope was identified by the vendor Playa One – of which Gotthard is the major shareholder – as having unique climatic and geological characteristics that have resulted in the formation of what is probably a globally unique deposit of aluminium-rich material within the surficial clay layers of two small salt lakes.

The lake clays, which are only up to a few metres thick, have unique chemical and physical properties and consist almost entirely of aluminium-bearing minerals that are plasticine-like in consistency and can be easily sampled with hand-held augers and push tubes.

This has resulted in a mineral deposit with a parent ore that is very soft and shallow, allowing for extremely cheap free-digging with limited infrastructure requirements, no pre-stripping, no selective mining, a tiny environmental footprint, and limited rehabilitation requirements.

Additionally, the small size of the particles – virtually all of which are less than 16 microns – removes the need for crushing and grinding, allowing for transport to an offsite processing facility that can be built on existing industrial sites.

A logistics option study identified Kwinana, Albany, Esperance and Kalgoorlie as possible locations for a processing plant as they are roughly equidistant from Lake Hope and easily accessible via road, rail, and ports for reagent supply and product export.

To make it even more attractive, the few minerals present in the ore require only simple washing before acid leaching, which allows for low-cost, straightforward metallurgical processing.

Importantly, this process eliminates the need for front-end energy-intensive calcination required in the kaolin process, significantly reducing energy costs, flow sheet complexity and CO2 emissions.

Metallurgical testwork has also been successful in producing a 99.99% Al2O3 product – nominally 4N HPA – with the primary contaminants being iron, potassium and sodium, which compares favourably with the purity of other HPA products published in the public domain.

Current and upcoming work

A maiden Resource estimate is currently being prepared in accordance with the JORC 2012 Code, with further infill drilling in progress.

Impact is also completing the work required to produce a Scoping Study to confirm Playa One’s review.

 

 

 

This article was developed in collaboration with Impact Minerals, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

 

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.

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