Research on ABx agenda after timely tax rebate

ABx Group has pocketed a cool $1.25 million in research-and-development tax rebates after receiving more than $503,000 from the Australian Tax Office for rare earths activities in Tasmania throughout last year.

Earlier this month, the company’s 83 per cent-owned subsidiary Alcore took home a similar tax offset of $522,715 for work undertaken last year on its world-first process to recover hydrogen fluoride. Management says the combined offsets underpin its balance sheet and provides impetus for ongoing investment in research-and-development activities.

The company was the first to discover rare earths in Tasmania at its Deep Leads-Rubble Mound project in Australia’s island State. Metallurgical testwork undertaken by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) on a selection of samples from the site confirmed the mineralisation is in ionic-adsorption clay and capable of delivering high-recoveries in excess of 70 per cent.

Just last month, ABx lifted its mineral resource at the operation by 30 per cent to 27 million tonnes averaging 803 parts per million total rare earth oxides (TREO). The heavy permanent magnet rare earth oxides, dysprosium and terbium, represent 4.2 per cent of the TREO, which the company says is the highest-known proportion for any ionic adsorption clay-hosted rare earths resource in Australia.

ABx Group managing director and chief executive officer Mark Cooksey said: “Ionic adsorption clay rare earths are currently only extracted in southern China and so are relatively novel, globally. We have made a number of critical advancements in how to drill these clays, how to most efficiently process them and improved our understanding of the geological mechanisms that led to the formation of mineralisation.”

Since declaring a maiden resource estimate late last year at its rare earths project, ABx has kept its drill rods spinning and increased its resource by a staggering 680 per cent. Earlier this year, testwork on rare earths samples collected from its Deep Leads and Rubble Mound deposits delivered Australia’s highest reported clay-hosted rare earths extraction rates with returns of up to 83 per cent.

The testwork involved desorption-style analysis on 71 specimens from the two deposits with 44 samples from the program delivering recoveries of between 24 per cent and 83 per cent. ABx says the group which delivered the bumper returns came through testwork completed on samples derived from ionic-adsorption clay zones in its maiden mineral resource area.

China currently controls about 86 per cent of the planet’s rare earths supply, with much of that country’s inventory held within the clay-style deposits that are renowned for economical extraction and processing costs.

ABx says ionic adsorption clay rare earths provide several critical advantages over other types of deposits, including potentially improved processing economics, in addition to a greater proportion of the highly-valuable heavy rare earths such as dysprosium and terbium.

Alcore has developed a ground-breaking process where it recovers hydrogen fluoride from an aluminium smelter waste product. The product is then combined with aluminium hydroxide to produce aluminium fluoride – a high-value chemical essential for aluminium smelting.

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