Canada’s NioCorp Developments Ltd has announced positive results from the company’s ongoing metal-lurgical work related to the process to extract rare earth elements from ore samples sourced at the Elk Creek project in Nebraska, the U.S.
“Salt Lake City-based L3 Process Development … has been conduct-ing small scale testing for NioCorp on rare earth recovery and flow-sheet improvement and is also building an integrated demonstration plant at its facility in the province of Quebec. To date, L3 has com-pleted several dozen individual tests using portions of a three-tonne representative sample of ore collected from the Elk Creek Project drill core inventory,” the company said in a statement.
Recent efforts by L3 were focused on potential rare earths recovery which included “the extraction of rare earth values from the high acid-ity streams characteristic of those found in the existing Elk Creek ni-obium / scandium / titanium process flowsheet,” according to the statement.
The company said that L3 has also demonstrated that various rare earth elements, such as lanthanum through lutetium, including the magnetic rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, as well as terbium, “can be selectively extracted and separated from the leach solution using an amide-based extractant.”