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Strategies & Market Trends : Winter in the Great White North -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ralfph who wrote (5096)	9/24/2003 6:19:47 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8273

I worked in that area looking at heavy minerals fora company that had some of the same ideas as TIC, or Titanium Corp. There are those metals in the tails. There is a big market in white paint. The metals are granular and separable in the lab. Some precious metals exist, such as Au and Pt. It is an unusual environment. I talked to Suncor and Syncrude engineers who studied ways of getting the metal out of their tails. There were estimates of total contained value that sounded economic. I talked to another engineer who had worked on that sort of heavy mineral project in another area, with rutile and ilemenite. what he said was the metals are not that easily separable by plant process. You could not make an effective marketable concentrate in his books. This is process driven, and market driven. Once you have process, and plant you also have to have market, and buyers. Ilmenite for sale and value should be converted to synthetic rutile for more market value. It has salability. Zircon I think, is highly theoretical in any quantity. If there is some way or getting all the metals in different streams in sufficient purity and keeping shirt on, then fine. There may be fatty acid flotation or sink float, or gravity/magnetic means like you see for separating para-magnetics from magnetics in high mag separators, and different heavies in "psuedo" centrifugal fields where fluids have "pseudo high Specific Gravity" induced by magnetic fields. All kinds of tricks, but you have to have them lined up. In other words it is a mineral process engineering story. Gotta believe they got it or its a head scratcher. EC<:-}