Korean-Australian Joint Project Targets China’s Rare Earth Control

A joint South Korean-Australian mineral processing research project is showing potential to eat into China’s dominance in the high-value, strategically important rare earth industry. At present, the Ziron Tech project has successfully produced the two most important metals in the rare earth family-praseodymium and neodymium, which are used to make the permanent magnets used in electric cars and renewable energy systems.

In addition to producing metal samples weighing 18.5 pounds, the Australian media partners signed an agreement last week to build a commercial factory that will produce 550 pounds of metal per day. A long time in planning, the key to the Korean-Australian Ziron Tech process is a unique orebody located near the city of Dubbo in the Australian State of New South Wales.

If the work in Korea leads to full-scale commercial rare earth production it will be the second Australian project to challenge China’s dominance of the industry, following the Lynas Corporation project based on ore mined at Mt Weld in Western Australia.

Alkane Resources, the original owner of the Dubbo project, spent more than 20 years trying to find a way to commercialize its discovery, which is rich in zirconium (used in ceramics), niobium (used in specialty steel), rare earths, and hafnium (used in nuclear power station control rods), as well as titanium and uranium.

Separating different metals in a cost-effective manner to produce commercially viable production processes is challenging, as is the cost of meeting the development of mines and processing plants.

Earlier this year, Alkane transferred the Dubbo Project to the Australian Strategic Minerals Corporation (ASM), which began cooperation with researchers from Chungnam National University in South Korea.

The result is a new, low-energy and environmentally clean, metal processing system that crushes and grinds Dubbo ore before dissolving it in a bath of hydrochloric acid and then drying and separating into product streams.

The first material to emerge from the Ziron Tech process, which is 95% owned by ASM, was a batch of titanium alloy, followed by neodymium alloy.

Since the announcement of the output of these two alloys in the middle of the year, it has been steadily producing other metals, pure neodymium metal on July 30 and pure praseodymium metal on August 19.

In early September, production of permanent magnets made from Dubbo-sourced neodymium and praseodymium was reported with each announcement lifting the ASM share price on the Australian stock exchange.

Since being divested by Alkane, ASM has refocused on gold mining. ASM's share price has risen 140% in less than five months, from 98 cents (A$1.40) to $2.38 (3.40) on the first day of trading at the end of July. Australian dollars).

ASM said last week that it had signed an agreement with South Korea’s Dongkuk Refractory and Steel to build a commercial plant with a daily output of 550 pounds to process Dubbo ore through the Korean-Australian Ziron Tech process to weaken China’s dominance. By value at current prices, zirconium is expected to generate the biggest share of revenue (43%), followed by rare earth (30%), niobium (17%) and hafnium (10%).

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