Pursuit Minerals (ASX:PUR) has quietly gone about its business becoming an emerging vanadium player in Europe — with scoping studies confirming its projects as promising.

The company, which has reduced costs, and is embarking on a process to secure strategic partners for its quality vanadium portfolio in Scandinavia, previously advised the market that two scoping studies had confirmed that it should be able to produce a high-grade vanadium magnetite concentrate as the first phase of developing projects in Sweden and Finland.

By producing a vanadium magnetite concentrate, pre-production capital expenditure requirements will be kept to a minimum and also Pursuit should be able to get into production sooner.

Meanwhile, it said that it remains in talks with potential strategic partners to help in the assessment and development of two key assets.

The scoping studies also noted that after it develops its first phase of producing a vanadium magnetite concentrate, Pursuit will then look to construct a centralised processing facility to produce a vanadium oxide flake product, with feed for such a plant to be potentially sourced from several of Pursuit’s own projects.

The projects in focus

While Pursuit has a suite of vanadium projects in Sweden and Finland, the main assets are the Airijoki project in Sweden and the Koitelainen project in Finland.

 

Airijoki

A scoping study completed on Airijoki during the quarter found the best option to develop the project would be to mine the four components, which make up the Airijoki resource, and produce the vanadium magnetite concentrate to sell into global markets.

It was based on an inferred mineral resource of 44.3 million tonnes at an in-situ grade of 0.4 per cent vanadium oxide, containing 5.9 million tonnes of magnetite at 1.7 per cent vanadium oxide.

This would give it 100,800 tonnes of vanadium oxide based on a 13.3 per cent recovery and a 0.7 per cent cut-off.

Interestingly, as part of the scoping study it was able to increase vanadium magnetite recoveries from 13 per cent to 22 per cent — which is an increase of 65 per cent.

It would then be able to recover vanadium magnetite from the vanadium oxide at a rate of more than 70 per cent.

Koitelainen

Over the border in Finland, a scoping study confirmed it would be able to create a vanadium magnetite concentrate at 2.3 per cent vanadium pentoxide, with a magnetite mass recovery rate of 8 per cent.

Testing of three holes at the project as part of the scoping study found that recovery could be boosted from its previous 5.3 per cent to 8.8 per cent — which could indicate material upside to the official Mineral Resource there.

The study found that mining could be a simple bulk mining operation, using a standard drill and blast, load, haul and crusher feed and magnetic separation method.

 

This story was developed in collaboration with Pursuit Minerals, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.
This story does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.

 

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