Kalium Lakes Posts Positive Purification Plant Outcomes
THE DRILL SERGEANT: Kalium Lakes (ASX: KLL) informed the market of progress it is making regarding testwork optimisation for the Purification Plant at the company’s 100 per cent-owned Beyondie sulphate of potash project (SOP) in Western Australia.
Kalium Lakes said the recent work utilised harvested salts from pilot evaporation ponds at the Beyondie project, which were subjected to duplicated laboratory trials at both K-UTEC in Germany and Saskatchawan Research Council (SRC) in Canada.
The company said the testwork had continued to optimise process flow sheet design while building on previous work completed in the Prefeasibility Study.
Optimisation works for batch recovery trials within the processing plant utilising more than one tonne of harvested salts from the pilot evaporation ponds achieved individual recoveries of between 90 per cent to 98 per cent.
Kalium Lakes asserted that the overall SOP recoveries achieved have the potential to increase to more than 80 per cent, including evaporation pond losses associated with both leakage and recovery.
Sulphate of potash product quality has been enhanced to a premium 51 to 52 per cent potassium oxide (K2O) product with minimal chloride (less than five per cent) and insoluble material
The company said there is optimisation and equipment vendor testwork ongoing utilising eight tonnes of recently harvested salts from the pilot evaporation ponds.
Final product specifications aim to produce a Kalium Lakes Premium SOP, Granular SOP and horticulture grade Soluble SOP suite of products.
“Kalium Lakes is continuing to reduce process risk by duplicating work in both Germany and Canada so as to independently verify and optimise the repeatability of the proposed flowsheet,” Kalium Lakes managing director Brett Hazelden said in the company’s announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange.
“Utilising salts from our large-scale pilot evaporation ponds has allowed us to produce representative mixed potassium salt samples which have then been utilised to optimise the process.
“The results to date have been considerably better than our Pre-Feasibility assumptions and we have continued to improve the final SOP product quality.
“We are now moving to the final phase of testing and optimisation with a further eight tonnes of material harvested and sent to the two international facilities.
“This material will provide bulk samples for equipment vendor testing to enable process guarantees to be put in place, as well as producing marketing samples for potential offtake customers.”
Email: info@kaliumlakes.com.au
Website: www.kaliumlakes.com.au