Date:Apr 27, 2018
Australian Vanadium returns excellent grades from Gabanintha project
Australian Vanadium is carrying out testwork at its 100 per cent-owned Gabanintha vanadium project near Meekatharra in Western Australia in order to determine potential recovery rates and quality of vanadium concentrate and progress to pre-feasibility study (PFS).
The project contains a massive zone of high-grade magnetite, with an average thickness of 20m extending over 11km of strike.
Optimisation tests on nine transitional samples via a process of wet, intensity, magnetic separation (WLIMS) have resulted in average concentrate grades of 87.8 per cent vanadium in a 1.79 per cent vanadium pentoxide (V2O5 ) concentrate, with combined concentrates held an average mass yield of 67 per cent.
The metallurgical testwork utilised 24 massive-titaniferous magnetite samples selected from within 10 diamond drill holes with a 173m depth range from 14m to 187m, representing a significant slice of the current resource area.
The project’s current high-grade measured, indicated and inferred levels currently stand at 10.2 million tonnes (Mt) at 1.06 per cent V2O5, 4.8Mt at 1.04 per cent V2O5 and 77.8Mt at 0.94 per cent V2O5, respectively.
Vincent Algar, managing director of Australian Vanadium, commented that Gabinintha was “rapidly taking its place as a new deposit highly comparable to the few existing global vanadium mining operations”.
