Junior miner Black Canyon, which trades under the ticker ‘BCA’, has successfully produced battery-grade manganese.
Testwork yielded high purity manganese sulphate monohydrate (HPMSM) with a grade of over 99 per cent purity, meeting the battery-grade threshold.
HPMSM is used to make the cathode in a lithium-ion battery, contributing between 8 and 60 per cent based on the type of battery. For that reason, HPMSM has been growing in demand along with the electric vehicle (EV) market.
As is the case with many other minerals and metals, China dominates the HPMSM market, contributing roughly 93 per cent to global production.
Europe, North America, Japan, Korea, and many other countries import 100 per cent of their manganese requirements, including HPMSM.
Black Canyon holds a number of projects in the Pilbara region of WA. The company has defined a 171 million tonne JORC resource at 10.3 per cent manganese (for 18 million tonnes of contained manganese) at its flagship Flanagan bore deposit.
The company is currently working on defining the mineral resource at its Balfour manganese field project, from where it produced this first batch of HPMSM.
Black Canyon executive director Brendan Cummins called production a milestone achievement for the company and its shareholders.
“The testwork confirms manganese oxide materials from the KR1 prospect, located within the Balfour manganese field, can produce high purity and in specification HPMSM,” Cummins said.
The company will continue to deliver key milestones to attract the next level of interest in our projects, which is to establish large mineral resources, evaluate hydrometallurgical variability, substantially progress the battery grade HPMSM flowsheet development, and now commence upscaled testwork for flowsheet robustness and understanding the carbon footprint.”
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