Lava Blue says it is making great strides towards a decision to build a high-purity aluminium (HPA) plant at Charters Towers after successful processing test work with the Queensland University of Technology.

The unlisted public company holds tenements between Greenvale and Mount Garnet that are rich in kaolinitic clays, bearing a high alumina content.

Lava Blue managing director Michael McCann said the Lava Plains tenements had a JORC resource of about 15 million tonnes grading at 28 per cent AL₂O₃.

While having a kaolin resource itself was no rarity, he said the capability to refine it was the barrier to entry to this market.

In 2018, Lava Blue partnered with QUT to develop a process to turn kaolin clay into high value high purity alumina (HPA) – a key material used in sapphire glass and battery separators.

“We’re now two and a half years into the collaborative research arrangement with QUT and we’re about to scale up processes developed in the lab specifically for our iron rich red clay to a miniplant scale, which will produce 20kg batches of HPA,” Mr McCann said.

Mr McCann said that, at this stage of the planning for investment into commercial production of HPA in northern Queensland, Charters Towers had emerged as the optimal location to host a plant designed on the basis of the miniplant results.

“We don’t want to build the plant out at the mine. It’s not rational to be building plant way up the hill, middle of nowhere, and then making people travel there,” he said.

“It’s much easier to transport the relatively small quantities of the raw material needed to where the people are – using a small, dedicated crew at the mine and on the road. We want to build the processing plant next to a community where most of the jobs will be, rather than make the community drive for hundreds of kilometres a week.”

Construction planned in 2023/24

Mr McCann said Lava Blue hoped to start construction of its first production train of a commercial-scale plant from late-2023 to mid-2024.

“The miniplant will run until the end of next calendar year, but from March next year we will be commencing detailed engineering and design of a full-scale plant in parallel,” he said.

The initial train was expected to cost about $40-$50 million to establish, producing about 1000tpa HPA, with subsequent trains costing $30-$35 million each to bring online, he said.

“Eventually we might go to 4000 or 5000 tonnes per annum of HPA production in multiple trains,” Mr McCann said.

Lava Blue plans a campaign mining operation, with low-impact seasonal extraction from shallow pits and near to immediate remediation.

“One of the benefits of our permits and the resources we have mapped out is that they are all essentially at surface,” Mr McCann said.

“This is really not a traditional mining and processing operation. Raw material inputs required to get to economic HPA production levels are not great, and as a result the the impact on the landscape will be nothing like what people are accustomed to seeing from any of the major industrial or precious metal mining operations.

“We are designing an extraction program that will estrange very little of the current grazing activity at any one time, and should actually result in improved pastures and water, while creating high value high skilled jobs right near town.”

Up to 150 full-time jobs to be created

Mining and processing combined are expected to create about 40 to 50 full-time jobs in the initial 1000tpa stage.

“Every subsequent 1000 tonnes should add between 25 and 30 additional jobs. At 5000tpa we could have 150 full-time jobs,” Mr McCann said, “with the vast majority of those in town.”

Originally targeting energy metals, Mr McCann was making a search of historical records in Queensland when the Lava Plains area initially attracted his interest, particularly the potential laterite nickels around the edges of the McBride Basalts.

“We put in first applications for exploration permits in 2009. We thought we knew what we wanted and in the end we found ourselves ultimately with quite a large holding,” he said.

“As it turns out some of our original assumptions were proven wrong and – despite throwing a fairly wide net, the large nickel/cobalt Sconi project was discovered just to the east of our original exploration areas.

“However as it turns out we ended up with extensive coverage of these productive Lava Plains clays that we have now proven can be used as source material for HPA.”

Mr McCann said that Lava Plains was one of the youngest volcanic landscapes in Australia and there was some evidence of eruptions as recently as between 25,000 to 100,000 years ago.

“Of course there was also the historical Lava Plains sapphire mines,” he said.

“We started looking at the clay that the sapphire was hosted in and have developed this detailed understanding of the nature of the contained aluminium,and that has led us to this high purity alumina project.”

Australia in ‘box seat’ for battery value chain

Mr McCann described HPA as a 21st century material, with demand rocketing in line with the growth of the LED industry and other applications such as mobile phones.

“The rapid shift to batteries in everything, and the need for battery minerals such as nickel sulphates, cobalt and HPA to be high-purity, very carefully controlled products, means that Australia is in the box seat to finally do what everyone has agreed we should be doing all along – process our abundant minerals here, and keep more of the jobs and value at home.”

• All images courtesy of Lava Blue.