Rainbow Rare Earths is pleased to announce successful results from the ongoing test work for the Phalaborwa project in South Africa. This unique project encompasses the recovery and separation of REE from phosphogypsum stacks, a waste product from phosphoric acid production, meaning that many of the costs, risks and long timescales associated with traditional mining projects are eliminated.
Considerable progress has been made upgrading the MREC to >55% TREO and reducing the pregnant leach solution (PLS) from 340 m3/hour down to between 7-10 m3/hour feeding the final separation circuit. Rainbow expects to finalise the final stages of the process flowsheet to achieve the 99.5% purity levels in our targeted REE products in the near future.
George Bennett, CEO, commented: “These results represent significant progress for the Phalaborwa project, confirming the potential to become a very low-cost producer of light and heavy REE, and one of the highest margin projects in development globally. They also validate our decision to finalise our flowsheet test work in-house and demonstrate that we have developed the expertise to address REE extraction and separation in a highly efficient manner. The West is finally recognising the importance of REE, used in permanent magnets vital to the functionality of many of the products that underpin 21st Century society, as well as to emerging and advanced technologies. A number of recent initiatives by the U.S., Australian and European Governments are aimed at improving the economics of, and supporting the financing for, REE projects to rapidly build out end-to-end rare earth permanent magnet (REPM) supply chains. The recent offtake agreement between the US Department of Defense and MP Materials utilising a floor price of US$110/kg NdPr demonstrated industry acceptance of a floor price significantly above current market pricing required to ensure new sources of supply to feed a Westen supply chain. Whilst Rainbow’s project is very robust at current REE pricing and is expected to deliver a positive EBITDA, we are therefore very comfortable with this bench-mark floor price set by MP Materials as it is the same price used for NdPr in Rainbow’s updated December 2024 interim economic assessment of Phalaborwa which demonstrated the project would generate ca. US$181 million annual EBITDA once in production.”
Highlights
- Rainbow’s low-cost process, optimised at its in-house laboratory in Johannesburg, has delivered an exceptionally pure mixed rare earth product utilising continuous ion exchange (CIX)
- This purified product delivers a mixed rare earth carbonate (MREC) averaging >55% total rare earth oxides (TREO) across multiple test samples / campaigns, considerably exceeding the rare earth industry’s typical refinery specification of >42% TREO
- The purified mixed REE product compares with the highest grade MREC specifications produced by any REE development/producing project globally
- This purification is a major step towards separation success as the delivery of a high grade; low impurity feed stream is key to achieving separated rare earth oxides (REO) of the desired purity
- The TREO purity of the Rainbow MREC specification after multiple tests is now consistently >93% vs the accepted industry specifications of >90%
- Modelling, and an updated costing, of the proposed final separation process has now commenced based on this high purity feedstock, significantly advancing the Phalaborwa project
- Work on the Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) for the primary leach flowsheet, which is the process that delivers the MREC and which represents ca. 85-90% of the total project Capex, is progressing well
- The recent trade-off studies are being incorporated in the DFS and are expected to deliver further savings in both capital and operating expenditure
- As a low-cost, near-term and responsible source of both light and heavy REE, Phalaborwa can play an important role in the delivery of an independent supply chain for these critical minerals, which are vital to both national security and economic resilience
