Northern Minerals boosts project team

Northern Minerals has made a raft of new appointments as its commences a pre-feasibility study for its Browns Range rare earths project in the Northern Territory.

Tony Hadley, a metallurgist with more than 20 years experience who has previously held the role of operations manager for Lynas Corporation's Mount Weld rare earth mine, will take the role of process manager. 

Former Newcrest Mining senior resource geologist Bill Rayson joins Northern as senior development geologist while Enej Catovic will commence as senior process engineer.

Northern has commenced work on a pre-feasibility study for the Browns Range project following positive results from an internal scoping study and has raised $30 million in project funding this year.

Northern managing director George Bauk said the appointments positioned the company well for the next phase of developing the project.

"We are now at a very exciting and busy stage in our project develoment as we finalise our scoping study and move into a pre-feasiblity study and these additional appointments will help us deliver the work program required to meet our target of first production by 2016," Mr Bauk said.

Northern shares gained four per cent to reach 24.5 cents at 10:00AM WST.