Red Metal managing director Rob Rutherford said: “Impurity removal and precipitation of a saleable product with minimal REO loss is an important hurdle to clear for both the Granite-Hosted Sybella and Ionic Clay-Hosted deposit types. As such, success with our first impurity removal attempt is a major step forward for the Sybella REO discovery as it shows the essential indicators are in place to cost effectively produce a quality MREC product.”

The company says it is now confident that ongoing optimisation studies will lead to increased revenues by specifically reducing expensive acid consumption and ensuring that impurities in its final product remain low.

By reducing the acid strength to a lower-cost pH 3-3.5 acid, it is also expected to improve the downstream impurity removal, as aluminium and iron typically fall out at those lower strengths without diminishing the all-important rare earth oxides.

Red Metal launched resource drilling after metallurgical testwork had confirmed high rare earths recoveries using low-cost economic methods. It is a bold, but informed strategy, as a commonly-practiced method has been to spend millions of dollars on resource drilling before finding later on that the rare earths cannot be made economic.

The company recently completed more than 8000m of step-out drilling across a 24-square-kilometre area of the interpreted mineralised granite. It is now awaiting assay results from the lab.

Red Metal also has a 44 per cent stake in its “spun-out” former lead-silver project that is now operated by Maronan Metals. Maronan has a pair of 30 million-tonne ore bodies that make up one of Australia’s biggest and highest-grade undeveloped silver resources, with the silver price having surged up nearly 50 per cent in the past six months.

A premium MREC product highlights an important next step in the company’s proof-of-concept at Sybella. It continues to frank management’s metallurgy-first strategy as the project moves from being just an idea to a potential game-changer in the rare earths mining space.

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