ASX: RDM - Red Metal
- Matt Birney
- Jun 22
- 4 min read
Red Metal Ltd: Is this the Escondida of rare earths? A crazy big, heap-leachable operation
Red Metal Managing Director Rob Rutherford on 2GB, 3AW, 4BC & 6PR Bulls N' Bears Report
ASX-listed Red Metal Ltd Managing Director Rob Rutherford talks to Matt Birney on Bulls N’ Bears about Red Metals’ new testing that shows it has cracked the metallurgical code at its huge and geologically unique rare earths project
TO LISTEN TO THE RED METAL AUDIO INTERVIEW - CLICK BELOW
Red Metal's been developing a unique rare earths project near Mount Isa in Queensland. It's unusual because it's massive in terms of tonnes, but even more so because it is neither clay-based or a typical hard rock monazite-based geology. Red Metal's Sybella project is in weathered granite, a geological setting that management says can cheaply and easily be processed via heap leaching.
RADIO INTERVIEW - TRANSCRIPT
Matt Birney - Welcome to Bulls N' Bears, brought to you today by rare earths developer Red Metal Limited
Matt Birney - ASX code: RDM
Matt Birney - I'm Matt Birney, and I'm joined now by the Managing Director of Red Metal, Rob Rutherford.
Matt Birney - Hi, Rob.
Rob Rutherford - G'day. How's things?
Matt Birney - I'm good. Okay, so Red Metal's been developing a unique rare earths project near Mount Isa in Queensland. It's unusual because it's massive in terms of tonnes, but even more so because it is neither clay-based or a typical hard rock monazite-based geology. Red Metal's Sybella project is in weathered granite, a geological setting that management says can cheaply and easily be processed via heap leaching.
Matt Birney - And this week, the company backed up that claim by tabling some game-changing metallurgical tests. Okay, Rob, firstly, just describe Red Metal's Sybella project's geological setting for me and explain its advantages over those typical clay and monazite-based rare earths deposits.
Rob Rutherford - It's rather unique, we've got this unusual weak acid-soluble mineral, a fluorocarbonate mineral in a really low acid-consuming granite host rock.
Rob Rutherford - And when you put those two things together, it makes it really, really easy to get out, and cheaply.
Matt Birney - How big is this thing? What's the resource there now?
Rob Rutherford - The resource is vast, is we've outlined about 4.9 billion tonnes over about a 7 kilometer by 3 kilometer area. But we're focusing on about the Kary Zone, which is about a billion tonnes.
Matt Birney - And what, what sort of rare earths are in there?
Rob Rutherford - We've got total rare earth content of about between 1,700 and 1,900 PPM, and a, a large proportion of that is the magnet rare earth, neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium, the heavies, and that's really what the market wants for EVs.
Matt Birney - When it comes to rare earths, metallurgy obviously is everything.
Matt Birney - You've just run some metallurgical tests on Sybella, and I don't want to get bogged down into technical results, I just want to understand what they mean for the project. What were the key findings?
Rob Rutherford - The key findings were that we'd be able to get about 70 to 80% of the rare earths out with really low acid consumption.
Rob Rutherford - So our theory, uh, was that this granite rock won't react with the acid, so our rare earth minerals dissolved, we didn't consume much acid, and we got it out really cheaply.
Matt Birney - Okay. Now, you say your testing shows that the deposit is amenable to heap leaching instead of building a big traditional mine. What are the advantages there?
Rob Rutherford - The column test that we did involved crushing the rock up to 10 to 20 mm crush size. By being able to do that, it's some of the cheapest processing you can do in the world, where you just crush it to 10 or 20 mm, pile it up in a heap and sprinkle acid the strength of lemon juice over it. And that enables us to keep the cost right down and enables us to mine very low-grade material.
Matt Birney - Are there any other examples of heap leaching at this scale around the world?
Rob Rutherford - Probably the best copper deposit in the world is the giant Escondida deposit in Chile, which is, again, it's a acid-soluble copper mineral in a low acid-consuming granite host rock, and that's the key. It produces over a million tonnes a year of copper from one deposit, from a very large low-grade deposit.
Rob Rutherford - And, uh, we think we've got something very similar, but with rare earths.
Matt Birney - Rob Rutherford from Red Metal.
Matt Birney - Thanks for joining me on Bulls N' Bears. And remember, we're only here to give you information, not advice, which you should of course seek independently.
Matt Birney - I'm Matt Birney, and this is Bulls N' Bears.
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