Business View Magazine | June 2020

77 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JUNE 2020 Butcherbird. Then you have to develop a process pathway to produce a commercially saleable product and that was the breakthrough that CSIRO helped us with. Obviously, we’ve done a lot more testing and optimisation and refining of that process. So, we now have a well tested and confirmed flowsheet to take our ore through a leach process to allow us to produce a high purity manganese metal, and a high purity manganese sulphate for the lithium ion battery industry. “The key to this Stage 1 development to produce manganese concentrate was the optimisation of the front end beneficiation process which maximises the grade of the leach feed. It turns out, it also allows us to produce a nicely profitable concentrate product at a much lower capital cost. The Pre-Feasibility Study brings all the Stage 1 engineering together, overlaying commercial reality – the price you can realise in the market – the demand side, offtake and the ELEMENT 25 L IMI TED permitting that goes with it. All those threads come together to confirm the commercial viability of the project. Right now the resource is defined, the flow sheet is defined, permitting is progressing well, and all required Native Title agreements are in place.” “The main threads to take us to early 2021 production are detailed engineering, project approvals and of course financing. We are comfortable this is all achievable and we are working hard to deliver it. The cash generated by this first stage will then allow us to reinvest to grow the project to upscale production and take advantage of the very large resource that can provide feed material for an extremely long mine life using best practice, sustainable and socially responsible methods.” BVO: Is manganese the mineral of choice for batteries?