• Successfully separated rare earth elements (REE) from impurities such as iron and aluminium
• Delivered a final Strip Liquor with very low impurities showing 9 times enrichment of the total rare earth oxide (TREO) content
• Outlined a simplified and cheaper impurity removal flowsheet that offers significant capital and operating cost advantages

Red Metal is very pleased to report successful trials on the use of Ion Exchange (IX) resins that enrich the rare earth content and separate impurities from Pregnant Leach Liquor derived from leaching of the Sybella REO mineralisation. This breakthrough has the potential to further simplify the processing flowsheet and significantly lower the capital and processing costs. The IX loading test successfully demonstrated selective recovery of REE from the Pregnant Leach Liquor with greater than 99% REE recovery achieved over the first 8 bed volumes. Key impurities of iron and aluminium pass through the resin at 8 bed volumes while 99% of the REE are loaded to the resin. Stripping of loaded resin was trialled using a 2-stage approach involving an impurity pre-strip with weak acid eluent to remove weakly bound impurities, followed by REE stripping using a NaCl eluent. Approximately 85% of the REE were stripped from the resin over 8 bed volumes, with the final REE Strip Liquor achieving a TREO concentration of 9 g/L, approximately 9 times the concentration of the original Pregnant Leach Liquor. This outcome will result in a proportionally smaller downstream MREC circuit, reducing the project's capital and operating costs. In addition, minor metal impurities present in the maiden MREC have been significantly reduced through the IX process.

Future IX work will concentrate on optimisation of the IX process to incrementally improve the purity of the MREC product to further reduce costs and maximise the quality of feed to the MREC precipitation circuit. Advanced comminution studies and column heap leach tests are also planned to provide key data for a mine scoping study in 2026.