Displaying items by tag: vanadium

Finland: Betolar has signed a letter of intent with Australia-based RISAB and the Vanadium Recovery Project to research the use of slag ‘purified from vanadium’ in concrete production. Dow Jones Institutional News has reported that the company says that, through it Geoprime alkali-activated additive technology, the new slag source could replace 10% of the cement used in concrete production in Finland.

CEO Matti Löppönen said "We see a huge opportunity for Betolar here. If successful, we would be able to offer our customers a specific, currently unused slag of the steel industry to replace cement in concrete. Our customers already have experience in utilising other types of slag in the production of concrete using Geoprime. Utilising new side streams will expand the reach of our solution as planned.”

Betolar launched Geoprime in September 2021. It is currently developing a recipe-optimising artificial intelligence (AI) and data platform to bring together concrete producers and alternative raw material suppliers.

Zambia: BMR Group has finished laboratory scale test work on its imperial smelting furnace (ISF) slag dump at its Kabwe site. The company now intends to commission a study to convert its ISFS stockpile into a Joint Ore Reserves Committee (JORC) compliant resource. The site contains potentially 120,000t of zinc.

"These results are especially encouraging as they demonstrate the potential for BMR to extract a greater proportion of the in situ materials at Kabwe than previously anticipated for the benefit of our shareholders. We will therefore be commissioning a JORC survey of the ISF slag and will report the results of this survey to shareholders when available," said chairman Alex Borrelli.

Following the tests the company has announced that, in co-operation with Kupfermelt Metal Processing, its has reached a recovery of 85% zinc and 91% lead at a leach temperature of 80°C and 75% zinc and 80% lead at an ambient temperature. It has also more than halved its sulphuric acid consumption, compared to tests run in September 2015, to approximately 500kg/t. The sulphating acid brine leach process also recovered approximately 90% of the contained vanadium from the slag/leach plant residues (LPR) composite. The IFS slag potentially contains 9000t of vanadium which is expected to be recovered in the form of vanadium pentoxide.

BMR's metallurgical partner has advised that the proposed Kabwe processing plant can in due course be modified to incorporate a sulphating acid brine leach circuit to process the slag/LPR composite. The company's strategy remains however to treat first the wash plant tailings with the acid brine leach process.

Sweden: Boliden is interested in extracting vanadium from slag heaps owned by SSAB. The mining and smelting company has reportedly been interested in this process for several years and has developed an extraction method. Boliden was due to be updated on the matter by SSAB in March 2016, according to Esmerk Swedish News.

However, Finnish company Mustavaaran Kaivos is considered the most likely to cooperate with SSAB. The company plans to relaunch vanadium extraction in Finland, and has developed a high temperature method. The development has been supported by SSAB, Swedish research foundation Mistra, Swedish mining company LKAB and Finnish steel company Rautaruukki.