Mount Ridley Mines processing tech cracks vanadium extraction
Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD) has injected a serious dose of commercial reality into its proprietary "Selectro" processing technology, extracting a massive 96 per cent vanadium, 49 per cent titanium, and 78 per cent iron from a third-party titanomagnetite sample.
The breakthrough marks the third distinct feed type mastered by the patent-pending Selectro platform, hot on the heels of successful trials handling bauxite and rare earth-rich clays. By conquering titanomagnetite - a titanium-rich iron oxide mineral and the world’s premier source of vanadium - Mount Ridley has drastically blown open its addressable licensing market.
While typical raw vanadium-laden titanomagnetite (VTM) deposits are lean, generally carrying a modest 0.2 to 1.5 per cent vanadium pentoxide, the external sample provided to Mount Ridley sat at the premium end of the spectrum with a hefty head grade of 1.30 per cent vanadium pentoxide,(, alongside 14.2 per cent titanium dioxide and 52.3 per cent iron.
Conventional processing often requires a hugely expensive, high-temperature salt roast just to liberate the vanadium, while still leaving the valuable titanium and iron locked up in the waste residue.
Mount Ridley has completely rewritten the playbook with a slick, two-stage ambient leach process that relies on the exact same chemistry for both steps, avoiding the costly roasting step entirely to slash both upfront capital costs and future operating overheads.
In the first stage, Selectro’s tunable chemistry went straight for the vanadium and iron, leaving the titanium behind and upgrading the titanium dioxide grade in the remaining material from 14.2 per cent to a healthy 21.5 per cent.
Once the solution was refreshed to clear loading constraints, the second stage targeted the remaining metal, supercharging titanium recovery more than five-fold from a baseline of just nine per cent up to 48 per cent. When the dust settled, total combined recoveries hit 95.5 per cent for vanadium, 48.6 per cent for titanium, and 77.6 per cent for iron.
Building on the strong results achieved from bauxite, this result is further evidence that Selectro is a processing platform with applications well beyond Grass Patch. Titanomagnetite is the world’s primary source of vanadium, but it has historically been processed for vanadium alone. Recovering 96% of the vanadium from the sample while also bringing titanium and iron into solution shows Selectro has the potential to unlock more value from this feed, which could improve the economics of titanomagnetite projects. Mount Ridley Managing Director and CEO Mr Allister Caird
Caird added he was particularly encouraged by the way Selectro tackled the metals in sequence, extracting vanadium and iron first before turning its attention to titanium. The second stage boosted titanium recovery more than fivefold, effectively demonstrating how selective leaching could also act as a form of metal separation. He also said own Grass Patch project, with titanium-scandium alloys among the premium materials being assessed in the company's CSIRO investigations.
The structural elegance of the leach sequence gives Mount Ridley a distinct operational edge. Because the metals separate cleanly between the two stages, the process acts as a built-in separation mechanism, allowing the company to control and optimise its product splits precisely.
The recovered titanium also creates a direct strategic link back to Mount Ridley’s flagship Grass Patch project near Esperance. Grass Patch hosts a colossal 946.1-million-tonne inferred scandium resource. Scandium is rapidly emerging as a high-value master alloy capable of refininges grain structure and boosting titanium’s strength at elevated temperatures, putting titanium-scandium alloys firmly in the frame for premium aerospace and defence applications. Mount Ridley is already co-developing these next-generation materials under its active CSIRO Kick-Start program.
Adding another dimension to Selectro’s commercial potential, its near-perfect vanadium extraction positions the tech as a disruptive force in the global energy storage supply chain. Vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) are rapidly becoming the global standard for grid-scale, long-duration energy storage due to their non-flammable nature and multi-decade lifecycles.
However, widespread deployment has historically been choked by vanadium's extreme price volatility and concentrated sovereign risk, with China controlling roughly three-quarters of global supply. By yielding high-value titanium and iron co-products, Selectro could dramatically subsidise and de-risk primary vanadium production outside dominant jurisdictions.
Selectro’s track record is fast becoming an undeniable proof of concept. Prior to this milestone, the same Selectro tech extracted 94.9 per cent gallium and 91.9 per cent aluminium from Australian Silica Quartz Group’s Darling Range bauxite. It has also and achieved up to 91.8 per cent scandium recovery from its own Grass Patch clays.
With Selectro now a proven performer across three different feed types and distinct mineralogies, Mount Ridley appears to be building a solid processing platform with applications that stretch well beyond its own tenure.
The company is pushing ahead with engineering designs for a dedicated Selectro demonstration plant for a larger-scale bauxite test to demonstrate the full mine-to-metal pathway and to that willshowcasee the technology's plug-and-play capabilities to global licensees.
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