JCU scopes dedicated critical minerals research centre

Location, location, location. That’s what’s going to get a new research centre for critical minerals at James Cook University over the line. Momentum is gathering to supply a nascent electric vehicle and green energy industry to the point where the elements to build the plants are considered in critically short supply. The urgency to develop an industry is also strategic. China dominates critical minerals processing China has most of the processing capacity. The restriction of supply a couple of years ago caught most western countries off-guard said James Cook University Economic Geologist Dr Ioan Sanislav. Dr Sanislav is among a group of academics leading the push for a centre for critical minerals studies being set up at JCU. Related: Welcome spark for Qld critical minerals push The New South Wales government has announced funding for Australia’s first Critical Minerals Hub. It was designed to promote exploration, develop supply chains, attract new investment as well as downstream processing and recycling. The race was on said Dr Sanislav. “It's a plan to establish an overarching unit,” he said. JCU Economic Geologist Dr Ioan Sanislav “I think the working name, so it's not an official name yet, it's Northern Australian Centre for Critical Minerals and Metals. So, this is at the stage, it's quite advanced within the university. “And the next stage is, now we're trying to move into getting funding to implement and develop this centre. “The main activity will be around critical minerals, but will be more than just geology, it will involve engineering. So, from discovery to extraction to processing and so on.” Critical minerals are dispersed around the world in disparate quantities in different countries. Future demand has the Queensland government relegating zinc and copper as critical despite the state having some of the world’s largest deposits. Most of that was in the north of the state and with it comes more critical minerals riches he said. “And it appears that high levels of zinc, for example, are found in deposits in the Herberton mineral fields where you have a series of polymetallic deposits. Related: Technology to unlock North’s critical minerals wealth “It's in the same area occurring with the typical tin and tungsten mineralization. And there we can have really high indium accumulations, but they're very small deposits. But associated with this (copper and zinc) mineralization, we get a series of other critical minerals, such as germanium. We get gallium. We can get cadmium-indium with the mineralization.” The incidence of battery metal cobalt was found with copper. Cobalt is considered to be a starter critical mineral along with Vanadium because of access and processing potential. There are four junior miner plays around Julia Creek developing Vanadium mines. The state government has recently committed $10 million to a pilot processing plant in Townsville. The fact that the region is consider the world’s second largest base metals province and city hosts world class refineries including Korea Zinc’s Sun Metals refinery and Glencore’s Copper Refineries Ltd leverages their argument said Dr Sanislav. Copper cathode from Glencore's Copper Refineries Ltd plant “Try to take advantage of the fact that we have good collaborations with the mining companies operating in the region … and develop the engineering so we can contribute to improving the extraction methods, to make it more efficient. “Our plan is to engage with the processing, the refining as well in the future, to see if we actually can extract these critical minerals that are mainly by-products rather than the main mineral, so it's extracted here in the country rather than being shipped overseas. “It's not surprising that with copper you can also get cobalt, you get gold, with the zinc you can get germanium, gallium and indium and so on. “That's not a surprise for us. I think it became a surprise as soon as these elements suddenly became economically important.”

JCU scopes dedicated critical minerals research centre

Industry Queensland

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