The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Metal Tech News – May 31, 2023
A mine at NioCorp's Elk Creek project in Nebraska would be a major domestic producer of niobium, titanium, and scandium.
L3 Process Development has built a demonstration plant at its facilities in Quebec to test a three-phase process for recovering rare earths, niobium, scandium, and titanium from ore derived from NioCorp's Elk Creek critical minerals project.
From the launch of a project aimed at producing incredibly strong and lightweight aluminum-scandium alloys, to significantly improving the recovery of niobium and titanium, NioCorp Developments Ltd. has released a flurry of promising new developments that elevate its goal of building a critical minerals hub around its Elk Creek project in southeastern Nebraska.
"Our goal is to make North America less dependent on foreign suppliers for the critical minerals we need to transition to a clean energy and less carbon-centric economy," says NioCorp Developments Chairman and CEO Mark Smith.
In addition to the niobium, scandium, and titanium that Elk Creek is best known for, the Nebraska project is also enriched with rare earths needed for the powerful magnets that go into electric vehicle motors and wind turbines.
According to a 2022 calculation, Elk Creek hosts 632,900 metric tons of total rare earth oxides, 970,300 metric tons of niobium oxide, along with 11,337 metric tons of scandium oxide and 4.2 million metric tons of titanium oxides in the indicated resource category.
This resource supports a mine estimated to produce 7,450 metric tons of ferroniobium, 12,063 metric tons of titanium dioxide, and 104 metric tons of scandium trioxide annually for over 38 years.
The rare earths have yet to be incorporated into the Elk Creek mine plan.
Toward its overarching goal of establishing Elk Creek as a domestic critical mineral hub, NioCorp is making advances that could increase the production and use of these elements essential to the envisioned low-carbon future.
While scandium represents the least of the critical minerals found at Elk Creek, it only takes a small quantity of this critical metal to reduce the weight, enhance the corrosion resistance, and improve the weldability of aluminum alloys.
These lightweight and durable alloys have large emerging applications in automotive and mass transit systems, commercial aviation, space, and defense.
"Scandium is a game-changer for electric vehicles, mass transit systems, aerospace and defense platforms, and a host of other technologies needed to reduce the carbon intensity of our economy and our world," said Smith.
NioCorp believes domestic-made alloys made from the scandium produced at Elk Creek could benefit the U.S. on multiple fronts.
"NioCorp's plans to produce more than 100 tonnes per year of scandium oxide and vertically integrating from the mine to the master alloy could enable North America to become a leading scandium producer," the NioCorp CEO added.
Toward this goal, NioCorp has entered into an exclusive agreement with Nanoscale Powders, a Boston-based energy materials company that has developed a proprietary process that increases the efficiency and reduces the environmental impacts of producing aluminum-scandium alloys.
The traditional method of introducing scandium into alloys is via a master alloy containing 98% aluminum and 2% scandium. NioCorp's and Nanoscale's goal is to demonstrate the ability to make Al-Sc master alloy containing up to 5% scandium.
The companies plan to first demonstrate Nanoscale's technology at a pilot scale using purchased scandium feedstock. If proven to be technologically and economically feasible, the goal would be to ramp up commercial production of aluminum-scandium master alloy prior to production of scandium oxide at Elk Creek.
"We look forward to eventually establishing aluminum-scandium master alloy production in the U.S. with NioCorp and ramping up to commercial scale as rapidly as possible," said Nanoscale Powders CEO Andrew Matheson. "The growing recognition of scandium's remarkable properties as an alloying agent with aluminum presents many exciting opportunities in both commercial and defense markets, and there clearly is strong latent demand for this material."
Having Elk Creek scandium available for alloys is predicated on ramping up production at the proposed Nebraska mine. On this front, NioCorp has received new results that will increase the amount of niobium and titanium produced from each ton of ore mined.
Final results from NioCorp's metallurgical demonstration plant in Quebec demonstrate that a new and improved hydrometallurgical process can recover 90.7% rate of the contained niobium recovery through the hydrometallurgical process, compared to previous recoveries of 86.8%. Overall recovery through the pyrometallurgical production of ferroniobium, a commercial iron-niobium alloy, is expected to be 86.7%, compared to the previous 82.4% recovery rate.
"These results point strongly to the likelihood of NioCorp producing more niobium from each tonne (metric ton) of Elk Creek Project ore, which could have positive impacts on our Project's anticipated overall financial returns," said Smith.
NioCorp's new process approach, which incorporates a chlorination step to improve niobium and titanium separation and purification, has demonstrated the ability to potentially produce three different niobium products – ferroniobium for high-strength steel alloys used for aerospace, automotive, defense, and industrial applications; niobium chloride used in glass and ceramic manufacturing; and niobium oxide for niobium-lithium-ion batteries, superalloys, superconducting applications, capacitors, specialized optics.
"These are very exciting results and they point to potentially greater production levels and additional optionality in terms of where we can sell niobium and the prices these products command," said Honan.
While the nearly 5% improvement in niobium recovery are expected to bolster Elk Creek Mine economics, they pale in comparison to the increased titanium recovery rates out of NioCorp's Quebec demonstration plant.
The new process can likely recover 83.7% of the contained titanium, more than double the previous 40.3% recovery rate.
The titanium produced by NioCorp's new process is in the form of titanium tetrachloride (TiCl4), commercially known as "tickle," instead of the titanium dioxide anticipated by the current Elk Creek feasibility study.
Tickle, a purer form of titanium synthetic rutile that generally commands a higher market price, is an input for producing high-purity titanium oxides and compounds used to manufacture white pigments, as well as titanium metal and aerospace-grade titanium alloys.
"The increasing value of potential titanium production in the Elk Creek Project is a direct result of our new processing design and the careful testing of that system at the demonstration plant level," said Smith. "This is one of the reasons why we have focused so intently on getting this process right and demonstrating its technical feasibility."
The higher niobium and titanium recovery rates point to the likelihood of higher production of these metals from Elk Creek ore, though a final determination of critical minerals produced can be made only after work related to a mineral reserve update, additional engineering, updated project capital and operating cost estimates, and other required information is incorporated into in an updated feasibility study.
With more than 16 years of covering mining, Shane is renowned for his insights and and in-depth analysis of mining, mineral exploration and technology metals.
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