Impact Minerals Makes HPA Metallurgy Breakthrough at Lake Hope

THE DRILL SERGEANT: Impact Minerals (ASX: IPT) reported making a breakthrough for producing High Purity Alumina (HPA) at the company’s Lake Hope project in Western Australia.

Impact Minerals announced the identification of a new proprietary metallurgical process for producing high-value HPA from the lake clays at the Lake Hope project.

The company explained the new process, called the LTL Process, has produced HPA at 99.99 per cent (4N) purity from the raw lake clay in only a few months of laboratory test work.

Impact claimed tis as one of the fastest times to produce HPA from raw materials reported by ASX-listed companies saying it attests to the relatively straightforward nature of the process.

The new process involves different reagents to those used in the Playa One Sulphate Process, which has also recently successfully produced 4N HPA, which Impact reported in February 2024.

Impact can earn an 80 per cent interest in Playa One Pty Limited, which owns the Lake Hope project, by completing a Pre-Feasibility Study (PFS) on the project which is currently in progress.

“Today we reveal a further exciting breakthrough for producing HPA from the unique mix of minerals that are present at Lake Hope, minerals which have allowed our new LTL Process to produce the benchmark 99.99 per cent pure HPA very quickly after starting the test work,” Impact Minerals managing director Dr Mike Jones said in the company’s ASX announcement.

“The LTL Process is simpler than the Sulphate Process that underpinned our recent Scoping Study and showed that at less than US$4,000 per tonne, Lake Hope may produce HPA at up to 50 per cent cheaper than our peers.

“We think that further work on the LTL Process could result in even lower operating and capital costs, and this would only further enhance the already impressive economics of the project, which has an NPV8 of well over $1 billion.

“We have now started further optimization studies for the LTL Process and will push forward with our Pre-Feasibility Study using both process routes for the time being to determine the best strategic choice for processing at the project.

“Given we can run all these tests in parallel for little extra cost, we are still on course to finish the PFS later this year and continue to look forward towards producing HPA from Lake Hope”.

 

TO READ THE FULL ANNOUNCEMENT: CLICK HERE