Medallion Resources Announces Successful Metallurgical Process to Extract Rare Earths from Beach Sand Monazite

Medallion Resources Ltd. (TSXV:MDL) has confirmed its caustic-route metallurgical process plans by making significant progress on its lab-scale metallurgical testing to extract rare earths from beach sand monazite. Medallion’s Chief Technical Advisor Dr Bill Bird and a metallurgical consultancy based in Denver has confirmed this, establishing an important step toward full process refinement and commercialization.

As quoted in the press release:

“We’ve received positive results after completing a full cycle of our metallurgical process, using one of the historically successful commercial methods for rare-earth production and an available high-grade, beach–sand monazite feedstock. We’re now fine tuning the process to optimize the flow sheet and operating parameters for the specific feed” said Don Lay, President & CEO. “With this initial testing complete, we remain convinced that using tried and true metallurgy, in a relatively low capital cost facility, and fed with by-product monazite, is the most viable and profitable path to new large-scale rare-earth production outside of China.”

Within a few weeks, the Company expects to complete the optimization of the processing cycle. The completed test will provide Medallion with a high-purity, rare-earth chemical concentrate product and related analytical data for prospective customers and partners. Some of the more important process improvements that have resulted from testing to date include:

Techniques for handling the waste material in the monazite feedstock,

1. Opportunities for recycling of water and reagents, and
2. Techniques for production of phosphate as a potential commercial fertilizer by-product of the process.
3. Medallion’s Monazite Strategy

The mineral monazite, a rare-earth element phosphate, is the world’s original rare-earth mineral source. Although found in hard rock deposits, monazite is also readily available in significant quantities as a high-grade by-product of heavy-mineral sands operations. Medallion’s rare-earth production strategy is based on entering into long-term monazite supply agreements with reliable heavy-mineral sands producers. This provides for the aggregation of monazite supply streams, large-scale mine-independent extraction, and marketing of a rare-earth concentrate. Medallion is positioning itself to help satisfy a percentage of non-China demand for rare-earth elements by providing a rare-earth chemical concentrate to downstream separation processors. This approach is expected to have relatively low capital and operating costs, as it uses a high-purity, rare-earth-bearing monazite as input and a time-tested, commercially successful metallurgical process to extract the rare earths.

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