Element 25 Confirms High-purity Manganese at Butcherbird

Battery metals explorer Element 25 (ASX:E25) has released positive results from bulk testing performed at the company’s Butcherbird project, located in Australia’s Pilbara region.

The Australian manganese company completed bulk metallurgical test work on four diamond drill hole core samples from Butcherbird, resulting in the production of high-purity electrolytic manganese metal (HPEMM).

Levels reached 99.95-percent purity, exceeding the industry standard of 99.7-percent purity.

The testing was part of a larger progressive scale up of the processing flowsheet designed to extract manganese and produce high-purity manganese, as well as battery-grade manganese sulfate and HPEMM.

The results will also be included in the ongoing prefeasibility study, which is expected to conclude sometime this year.

“These results are outstanding,” Element 25’s Executive Director Justin Brown said in the company announcement.

“To achieve such a high purity on our first attempt to scale up the flowsheet is remarkable and bodes well for the project’s future.”

The Butcherbird project holds a significant manganese deposit with current JORC resources in excess of 180 million tonnes of manganese ore. To date, Element 25 has completed a scoping study at the site with the end goal of developing the deposit to produce high-purity manganese sulFate for lithium-ion battery cathodes.

When optimized, Butcherbird will also produce HPEMM for use in the steel industry.

“The success of the test work carried out to date further confirms the process flowsheet which is a key enabling technology for the company’s strategy of producing high-value, high-purity, sustainably-produced manganese products from the 100-percent owned Butcherbird project,” noted the announcement.

Element 25 will now focus on multiple large-scale batch tests from approximately 6 tonnes of PQ diamond core currently being drilled, which will help the company enhance and improve the process.

Shares of Element 25 were up 9.38 percent on Tuesday (February 12), trading at AU$0.17.

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Securities Disclosure: I, Georgia Williams, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.