Currumbin plant steps up to meet critical minerals demand

Queensland mineral sands processor Currumbin Minerals is taking its operations to another level with an investment of about $1.5 million for a plant upgrade targeting rare earths. It comes on the back of a complete rebuild of the operation last year, costing more than $5 million, according to manager Brett Hoyle. The business currently supplies mineral sand products including zircon, rutile and ilmenite to domestic and overseas customers. Work on the horizon includes processing heavy mineral sands from Ark Mines' Sandy Mitchell rare earths project in Far North Queensland. Related: Ark lines up processing route for Sandy Mitchell "Currumbin Minerals has been around for a long, long time and the old plant was getting outdated and not economical to operate," Mr Hoyle said. "So the owners and directors, under my guidance, decided to build a complete new operation. "We decommissioned the old operation and built a modern, brand-new operation with the latest technology." This included state-of-the art CoronaStat mineral separators and magnets, he said. The next section will help separate rare earths from minerals sands, including from spent material left from primary processing at the plant. "Traditionally when you've got processed mineral sands, you get a certain amount of what they call middlings or waste or tailings," Mr Hoyle said. "We believe we should have a zero-waste operation and I've worked with other companies in the UK testing equipment that may suitably separate this material. "Then we've done our market research and we've been advised that we can sell all these products as well as being able to recover everything that we can. "So it'll end up being a zero-waste operation for what you can get in mineral sands on the east coast of Australia." The Currumbin Minerals spiral plant separates most of the silica sand from the other minerals being processed. The wet table plant, where the last of the silica is removed before material goes into the electrostatic and magnetic plant. Mr Hoyle said demand was high for products from the Currumbin plant and the company could see this growing as countries looked to reduce their reliance on China for supplies. "A lot of other countries are now coming to us, which we've never sold to, and we are not a massive producer of hundreds of thousands of tonnes a year," he said. "We're a boutique-type producer and we do concentrate on producing high quality." He said the plant had a processing capacity of 50,000-60,000tpa, but the business would be happy to double this with another plant inside its existing footprint if demand was there. Image at top of page: The Currumbin Minerals electrostatic and magnetic separation plant.

Currumbin plant steps up to meet critical minerals demand

Industry Queensland

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