The Tungsten “Brain Trust” on the Almonty Los Santos Mine Tour III
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Tailings Reprocessing
On another score the company has been considering the issue of tailings recovery as specific areas where tailings have been deposited still contain economic WO3 grades. The amount in the dumps is a not insubstantial amount at half the level of the current reserve in the ground.
Almonty tested reprocessing the tailings stockpile by blending tailings with fresh ore during Q1 2014. Bulk testing of 100% tailings ore was run through the plant at Los Santos without any additional modifications. Recovery rates achieve exceeded expectations and management believes that target recovery rates for tailings reprocessing will be achieved when the tailings stockpiles are eventually reprocessed.
Conclusion
Los Santos is clearly the milch-cow that feeds the rest of the Almonty empire. With its reserve, its stockpiles, it tailings to rework and the planned mini- “super-pit”, it should have another four years mine-life at least. Wolfram Camp’s turnaround has essentially been funded by Los Santos as has the Valtreixal mine plan. Planning is already advanced for Valtreixal to pick up the slack and use equipment and personal form Los Santos as it becomes available. Then there is the Sangdong mine which really awaits a price turnaround to fire up its motors.
Almonty’s management team, last decade, managed to get one Tungsten producer (Primary Metals) off the ground and now they are on their second go-around. This time they are not building to sell it but rather putting together a long-term producer and creating that hitherto elusive investment opportunity, a geographically diversified multi-mine Tungsten player. As they say, seeing is believing and certainly the mine trip brought home that Almonty is a tightly run operation with somewhat of a dream team in having corralled a goodly proportion of the Western World’s Tungsten “brain’s trust” into its employee ranks.
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The Tungsten “Brain Trust” on the Almonty Los Santos Mine Tour II
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Mining
The open pit operations are conventional drill and blast operations. The aerial view below shows the main pit with the green structure to the left being the processing plant and the Los Santos South (Main) pit being the bright white patch just right of centre. Towards the town at the top of the photo is a smaller Las Cortinas pit that has been developed over the last few years.
The production mining & drilling operations currently employ 65 people and this task is undertaken by a contractor. All of the other 68 employees on site work directly for Daytal (Almonty’s Spanish subsidiary).
For the moment plans for going underground have been discounted (while the price for APT remains where it is). In some ways the need for that strategy has been reduced by making the pits deeper and via the mini “super-pit” implementation.
Processing
The plant is located immediately to the south of the Los Santos Sur pit close to existing mine workings, the main waste dump and other infrastructure. The plant is now processing 500k tpa and is primarily based on gravimetric separation, aimed at recovering a high grade scheelite concentrate, so as to provide a concentrate containing greater than 68% WO3.
Production during the three months ended June 30, 2015 rose 18.75% when compared to the three months ended March 31, 2015. The main plant is currently undergoing a meaningful expansion to debottleneck operations and boost concentrate grade and recoveries. This expansion has been rather rapid only beginning a few weeks ago and expected to be finished before the end of November. The extension is being added to the end of the main building closest to us in the photograph above (which was taken before work began). Below can be seen the frame that was up last week. Cladding is probably already finished by now.
The latest additions will double throughput from the finishing circuit and remove what the company terms the “last bottleneck” in its process. It is expected that the extra pieces of kit to be housed in the extension will hike recoveries from 65% to 69% and boost the WO3 content from 63% to 67%. Output will rise from 5 tonnes per day to 5 ¾ tpd (therefore a 15% increase). The additional equipment has enhanced the ability to reprocess the tailings stockpiles.
This added production will come at no increase in staff costs.
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The Tungsten “Brain Trust” on the Almonty Los Santos Mine Tour I
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In the first week of November, we went to visit the Los Santos mine, one of the largest tungsten reserves in Spain, with a view to seeing current operations and discussing the other activities of the company in Spain, Australia and South Korea. The CEO of Almonty Industries (TSXV:AII), Lewis Black was on site at the time, as were staff that had worked at or visited the company’s other operations around the globe. Interestingly the staff are composed of a strong component of Portuguese mine staff, many of whom are known to the company management since the days when the Almonty team ran Primary Mining, which owned the Panasquiera Tungsten mine in Portugal.
The Los Santos scheelite deposit is in the province of Salamanca in western Spain. It is 180 km west of Madrid, 50 km south of the city of Salamanca. The drive to the mine from Salamanca is an easy one over a double carriageway most of the way through flat to lightly rolling landscape. The area around the actual mine is low hills with a mix of small holdings. The cultivation of pigs is the major industry in the region as the “capital of Jamon Iberico” is a small town nearby where the pigs fed on acorns produce this famous and costly product.
Los Santos is a large village of around 2,000 people. The mine has become quite an important feature of the local economy over the nine years it has been operating. With around 65 contract staff and tens of direct employees, the mine has a significant trickledown effect in such a small community. It is also worth remembering that unemployment in Spain is 25% at this time and has been even higher since 2008 and that in isolated rural areas it can be significantly higher. The company has strong relations with local mayors and councils. It has even established its company “canteen” in the town, rather than out at the minesite. This has effectively doubled the number of eating places in the town!
The mine is one kilometre east of the town of Los Santos and there is a newly paved road to the mine gate.
The Los Santos Mine
The Los Santos scheelite deposit was originally investigated by Billiton starting in 1979. Work undertaken included trenching and drilling. In one of the zones, Los Santos Sur, an 825m underground ramp was developed, along with level development at the 950m elevation, which provided bulk samples as well as underground drilling access. The ramp is still visible but has largely been consumed by the pit construction.
Billiton went as far as to carry out a pre-feasibility study of the prospect. By 1985, however, with a prevailing tungsten price of US$81/mtu, the project was not considered viable.
The project passed to the ownership of the ASX-listed company, Heemskirk. Under this new management the mine build began in 2008 and it was commissioned in July 2010.
The map above shows the minesite. Thus far one of the pits has been fully mined out and refilled. The blue represents the pits currently in production or planned. The two pits to the right (west) that nearly touch are intended to be combined into a sort of “super-pit” (well, not by Kalgoorlie standards) to exploit the mineralisation in the pit wall between the two existing pits.
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Crystals Aim to Light up Dark Matter
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German scientists hunting dark matter are set to produce half a tonne of high-purity calcium tungstate for their detectors, one 1kg crystal at a time. The CRESST-II experiment based in Gran Sasso, Italy is currently seeking this enigmatic substance, thought to explain the universe’s structure, with 10kg of calcium tungstate (CaWO4). Now Andreas Erb and Jean-Côme Lanfranchi are preparing crystals for its larger successor EURECA, which will begin operation in the French Alps in 5–10 years.
Gravitational effects suggest as-yet-unobserved dark matter in the universe outnumbers more familiar atomic matter four to one. Erb, Lanfranchi and their colleagues are hunting leading theoretical candidates, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). That name reflects their size – up to a lead atom’s mass – and the limited interaction with atomic matter that makes them hard to find, or ‘dark’. ‘They have to interact weakly to agree with the matter needed,’ says Richard Gaitskell from Brown University in the US, who isn’t involved in the calcium tungstate experiments.
Erb explains that the detectors should be able to pick up dark matter particles when they hit atomic nuclei in the crystals. ‘A higher sample mass gives a higher probability of such events.’ But distinguishing the miniscule amount of heat WIMP–nucleus collisions would produce requires detectors cooled to 10mK and shielded from ambient radioactivity.
CRESST/EURECA is the only team hunting dark matter with calcium tungstate, which has two advantages. Firstly, its different atoms cover a range of possible WIMP masses. ‘No matter the mass, you always have a nucleus with a high probability of interacting,’ Erb says. Second, it would also emit light when a WIMP hits it and monitoring the different signals will help the scientists eliminate background noise.
Having initially purchased crystals, this need for extreme sensitivity drove Erb and Lanfranchi to produce their own. ‘They weren’t pure enough for the background we want,’ Erb recalls. To avoid oxidation at calcium tungstate’s 1600°C melting temperature, the crucibles are made from rhodium, with their 12cm diameter vessel costing €120,000 (£97,300). Erb says that if they can grow two or three 1kg crystals per week then they will have the required amount for EURECA in about five years.
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Tungsten Oxide Surface Coating Increases Durability and Strength of Steel III
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Aizenberg stated that electrochemical deposition was an established technique used in manufacture of steel.
“I don’t want to create another line that would cost millions and millions of dollars and that no one would adopt,” Aizenberg said. She wanted to create a scalable process that would not affect the standard practices followed by the steel industry.
The material was tested in different ways - by scratching with diamond-tipped scribers, screwdrivers and stainless steel tweezers, and by repeatedly being hit with huge number of heavy, hard beads.
Following this, the material’s anti-wetting properties were tested using various types of liquids, including highly corrosive media, oil, water and biological fluids that contained blood and bacteria. The material demonstrated anti-biofouling behavior and repelled all of the liquid. Additionally, the tungsten oxide coating also enhanced the strength of steel.
Philseok Kim, co-author of the paper and co-founder and vice president of technology at SEAS spin-off SLIPS Technologies Inc., stated that the material holds significant promise for medical steel devices. “Because we show that this material successfully repels bacteria and blood, small medical implants, tools and surgical instruments like scalpels and needles that require both significant mechanical strength and anti-fouling property are high value-added products we are exploring for application and commercialization,” said Kim.
The material also holds considerable promise for functional 3D printing and microarray device applications. It could be very useful for printing highly sticky and viscous polymeric and biological materials, where contamination and friction are significant hindrances.
Every year, the effects of biofouling on hulls have cost the U.S. Navy tens of millions of dollars. Barnacles, algae and other such organisms create drag and increase the amount of energy required. Additionally, significant cost is involved in cleaning the hulls and reapplying anti-fouling paints. If this super-slick material could be scaled up, then it would hold promise as a cost-efficient, clean material.
“This research is an example of hard core, classic material science,” said Aizenberg. “We took a material that changed the world and asked, how can we make it better?”
The study paper on the new SLIPS-enhanced steel has been published in Nature Communications.
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Tungsten Oxide Surface Coating Increases Durability and Strength of Steel II
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“Our slippery steel is orders of magnitude more durable than any anti-fouling material that has been developed before,” said Aizenberg. “So far, these two concepts – mechanical durability and anti-fouling – were at odds with each other. We need surfaces to be textured and porous to impart fouling resistance but rough nanostructured coatings are intrinsically weaker than their bulk analogs. This research shows that careful surface engineering allows the design of a material capable of performing multiple, even conflicting, functions, without performance degradation.”
This material holds promise for a wide range of applications, such as non-fouling medical devices and tools including scalpels and implants, 3D printing nozzles, and marine and building applications.
The team had to find out ways to ensure that the structure of the steel maintained its anti-fouling capability without undergoing any mechanical degradation due to the new surface. The team grew an ultrathin film that was made up of hundreds of thousands of nanoscale rough, tungsten-oxide islands on a steel surface using an electrochemical technique.
“If one part of an island is destroyed, the damage doesn’t propagate to other parts of the surface because of the lack of interconnectivity between neighboring islands,” said Alexander B. Tesler, former postdoctoral fellow at SEAS, current research fellow at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and the paper’s first author.
“This island-like morphology combined with the inherent durability and roughness of the tungsten oxide allows the surface to keep its repellent properties in highly abrasive applications, which was impossible until now.”
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Tungsten Oxide Surface Coating Increases Durability and Strength of Steel I
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Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new nanoporous surface coating that increases the safety, strength, and durability of ubiquitous steel.
Accelerated corrosion test, in which unmodified stainless steel (300 grade) (right sample)and the lower part of the TO-SLIPS sample with a 600-nm-thick porous TO film on steel (left sample)were exposed to very corrosive Glyceregia stainless steel etchant. (a-h) Images show corrosion evolution as a function of contact time.
Over the years, the industry has developed different grades of steel. However, no significant change or improvement has been carried out on steel surfaces. The steel currently being used continues to be affected by abrasive materials and corrosion due to salt and water. Steel surgical tools are still not totally immune to infectious microorganisms.
The research team developed the new surface coating using rough nanoporous tungsten oxide. According to the researchers, this coating is considered to be the most durable anti-corrosive and anti-fouling material able to repel any type of liquid, even after being subjected to severe structural abuse.
Joanna Aizenberg’s lab at Harvard has developed numerous other anti-fouling, non-stick materials. Aizenberg is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science and core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
In 2011, Aizenberg’s team developed Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces (SLIPS), a coating that has since been used for a wide range of applications. In the present study, the team has used SLIPS to enhance the properties of steel.
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Tungsten Oxide Surface Coating Makes Steel Stronger And More Durable II
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The coating not only withstood all these tests but was also found to make steel stronger compared to the uncoated ones.
The researchers said that the concept of combining durability and anti-fouling properties in a coating was not as successfully made into reality until now, because rough texture often required to resist fouling makes coated metals weaker.
The team made this possible by making an ultrathin film of thousands of small tungsten oxide islands to directly coat the steel surface. If one part of one island is destroyed, the damage does not spread to the other islands due to the lack of connection among them. This helps the coating retain its repelling properties while helping the steel improve its durability.
Aizenberg said that the team's success proved that careful surface engineering is capable of combining two conflicting functions to work together in a way that doesn't hinder each other's performances.
The coating material had potential to be used on different industrial and commercial applications like non-fouling medical devices and tools, 3-D printers, large scale use on buildings and on marine vessels or vehicles. The beneficial properties the coating provided could save industries millions in production and maintenance costs.
"This research is an example of hard core, classic material science," said Aizenberg. "We took a material that changed the world and asked, how can we make it better?"
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Tungsten Oxide Surface Coating Makes Steel Stronger And More Durable I
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A newly made surface coating for steel can make it stronger and more resistant to rust and corrosion, according to its developers.
Scientists from Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) were able to create a surface coating for steel that not only repels corrosion but also makes the metal stronger.
"Our (coating material) is...more durable than any anti-fouling material that has been developed before," said Joanna Aizenberg, a core member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Aizenberg and her team developed a new surface coating made from rough, nanoporous tungsten oxide. It was found to be the most durable, anti-corrosive and anti-fouling coating material to date, tried and tested to resist rust and repel any kind of liquid even after the coated metal has sustained considerable structural damage.
The team tested the coating's durability by scratching with stainless steel tweezers, diamond-tipped scribers, screwdrivers and beating it hard, heavy beads.
Anti-wetting properties were tested by soaking the metals on various liquids like oil, water, blood and corrosive chemicals.
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New Report Sheds Light on the Sodium Tungstate Sales Global Market
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The report focuses on global major leading companies providing information such as company profiles, sales, sales revenue, market share and contact information. Then the Sodium Tungstate OEM market and Sodium Tungstate production market status is discussed.
The report provides a basic overview of the Sodium Tungstate industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure.
Development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures are also analyzed. This report also states import/export consumption, supply and demand figures, cost, price, revenue and gross margins.
The report then analyzes the global Sodium Tungstate market size (volume and value), and the sales segment market is also discussed by product type, application and region.
The major Sodium Tungstate market (including USA, Europe, China, Japan,.) is analyzed, data including: market size, import and export, sale segment market by product type and application. Then we forecast the 2016-2021 market size of Sodium Tungstate.
Finally the marketing, feasibility of new investment projects are assessed and overall research conclusions offered.
With 183 tables and figures the report provides key statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.
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