Kairos Minerals Delivered Encouraging Roe Hills REE Metallurgical Recoveries

THE DRILL SERGEANT: Kairos Minerals (ASX: KAI) has received results from metallurgical tests carried out on drill samples of rare earths-mineralised clay from the Black Cat rare earths prospect within the company’s Roe Hills project in Western Australia.

Kairos Minerals reported a return of very high extraction rates using hydrochloric acid leach.

“Before we drill for a large resource, we need to make sure we can beneficiate or upgrade the mineralisation to a saleable product for the market and these early tests demonstrate that there are no refractory components to the mineralisation that are often seen with clay-hosted REE project,” Kairos Minerals managing director Dr Peter Turner explained in the company’s ASX announcement.

Kairos submitted samples of REE-mineralised lower saprolite clays with representative grade of mineralisation that were collected and composited from two RC drillholes (RHRC136 & RHRC158) completed during the company’s 2023 campaign.

Total rare earth leach recoveries were very high at 89.9 per cent to 97.4 per cent for the four composite samples with total rare earth oxide (TREO) ranges of 2,072ppm to 5,685ppm.

“We now have good reason to be very confident with our Roe Hills REE project, with high in-situ grades of the clay-hosted mineralisation and large areas interpreted from the gravity results to be underlain by enriched syenites that will be tested in the next round of cost-effective aircore drilling,” Turner said.

“The leaching characteristics are first-class with truly high recovery rates between 90-97 per cent using hydrochloric acid.

“Several samples also show the REEs reporting to the finer fraction of the clays, especially in the valuable rare earths samarium (Sm), neodymium and praseodymium (Nd&Pr).

“This gives us encouragement to review a second stage of test work.”

 

TO READ THE FULL ANNOUNCEMENT: CLICK HERE