Tag Archives: Serbia

Rio Tinto commences lithium production at Boron mine site in California

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Rio Tinto says it has commenced production of battery-grade lithium from waste rock at a lithium demonstration plant at the Boron mine site in California, USA.

The demonstration plant is the next step in scaling up a breakthrough lithium production process developed at Boron, to recover the critical mineral and extract additional value out of waste piles from over 90 years of mining at the operation, it said. An initial small-scale trial in 2019 successfully proved the process of roasting and leaching waste rock to recover high grades of lithium.

The demonstration plant has a design capacity of 10 t/y of battery-grade lithium. It will be run throughout 2021 to optimise the process and inform Rio Tinto’s feasibility assessment for progressing to a production-scale plant with an initial capacity of at least 5,000 t/y, or enough to make batteries for around 70,000 electric vehicles.

Rio Tinto Minerals Chief Executive, Sinead Kaufman, said: “This is a valuable next step in scaling up our production of lithium at the Boron site, all from using waste material without the need for further mining. It shows the innovative thinking we are applying across our business to find new ways to meet the demand for emerging commodities like lithium, which are part of the transition to a low-carbon future.”

Rio Tinto’s lithium pipeline includes the Jadar lithium-borate project in Serbia, for which a feasibility study is expected to complete by the end of 2021.

Development of the lithium project at Boron draws on Rio’s long standing partnership with the US Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Institute (CMI), which is focused on discovering ways to economically recover critical mineral by-products from existing refining and smelting processes. CMI experts worked alongside Rio technical leads to help solve a number of key processing challenges to produce battery grade lithium at Boron, the company said.

FLSmidth to help modernise crushing, grinding circuit at Zijin’s Serbia copper op

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Zijin Mining Group has chosen an FLSmidth gyratory crusher, SAG mill and ball mill for the Majdanpek mine, part of the Chinese mining company’s majority owned Zijin Bor copper mine, in Serbia.

The delivery of the equipment to Majdanpek, 180 km from Belgrade, is expected to occur between 12 and 18 months from now, with the project estimated to reach completion by the end of 2020. The order has a combined value of around DKK200 million ($30 million), according to FLSmidth, and has been recognised in the order intake for the September quarter.

The order of the new FLSmidth crushing and grinding circuit for the front end of the concentrator comes as Zijin looks to modernise Majdanpek, which will be the largest of its three Serbian copper concentrators, FLSmidth said.

Acquired as part of the majority acquisition of Bor in late 2018, the Majdanpek mine uses open-pit mining and flotation to produce copper concentrates, with a designed mining and processing scale of 10 Mt/y, according to Zijin. The operation is currently at a scale of 6 Mt/y, it said.

In the next six years, the company says it plans to invest more than $1 billion in the upgrading, expansion, or construction of the four mines and smelter at Bor. After the completion of the first phase of the project, it is estimated output will go to 82,000 t/y of copper in concentrates, with the smelter producing 80,000 t/y of copper cathode. After the completion of phase two, this could go to 120,000 t/y of concentrate and 150,000 t/y of cathode.

Manfred Schaffer, President of Mining and Group Executive Vice President at FLSmidth, said: “This extensive order underlines the strong value proposition of FLSmidth to our customers in the copper industry. Our market leading crushers and mills will provide significant improvements for Zijin Mining in terms of productivity and processing efficiency.”