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- Assaying confirms widespread rare earth element mineralisation in clays
- Metallurgical test-work to assess the potential for clay-hosted rare earth deposits
- Consistent, widespread grades in 114 of 200 samples
- Depth testing required with samples collected from top of a clay unit
Chilwa Minerals (ASX:CHW) has confirmed an eight km long corridor of rare earth element (REE) mineralisation hosted in clays directly beneath its Mposa heavy mineral sands (HMS) deposit in southern Malawi.
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The company is now fast-tracking metallurgical studies and planning for deeper drilling to test the potential for high-value magnet rare earths.
“These are exciting results for Chilwa. We set out to test whether the clays beneath our Mposa mineral sands deposit carried rare earths, and the assays have come back confirming widespread REE mineralisation — averaging 525 ppm TREO and consistently above 500 ppm across an eight-kilometre corridor,” MD, Cadell Buss, said.
“Clearly there is a lot of work ahead of us, notably leachability testwork, however the results are especially compelling in terms of co-location with our mineral sands deposits. It would essentially be a dual-commodity mine — with heavy mineral sands at surface and rare earths in the clays beneath,” he added.
To date normal HMS sonic drilling at Mposa required drilling 2.0m of a ‘Basal Clay’, which marks the limit of prospectivity for mineral sands development – with deeper testing needed on the total rare earth oxide (TREO) grades which averaged 525 parts per million (ppm) and ranged up to 987 ppm, with 114 of the 200 samples (57%) returning more than 500 ppm TREO.
“The basket is encouraging too, with the valuable magnet rare earths — neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium — making up around a fifth of the total. The real prize would be if these rare earths prove to be held in an ionic-adsorption clay form, the style behind some of the world’s lowest-cost rare earth operations — economics in these deposits is an interplay of leachability and REE value, ie recoverable heavy rare earth component,” Mr Buss said.
“Measuring how much of the contained REE is recoverable by simple leaching is the key question our upcoming test-work is designed to answer.
“This is a reconnaissance result, not yet a mineral resource, but it opens yet another genuine new front for Chilwa.
“We will move quickly through desorption test-work to determine whether Mposa as well as the other HMS deposits on the license, notably the substantially larger Mpyupyu deposits, can host a clay-hosted rare earth opportunity alongside (ie underneath), its mineral sands endowment.”
Material from the intervals sampled is now being prepared for analysis to determine the recoverable, ionic- adsorbed proportion of the contained REE which will be assessed through metallurgical (ammonium-sulphate desorption) test-work.
CHW is up 19.3% to 89.5¢.
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