New-look Speciality Metals International on the march
Speciality Metals International has a new-look leadership team and is on the hunt for further near-production tungsten and gold assets as it continues to crank up operations at Mount Carbine.
The Far North Queensland site is a multi-pronged proposition for Speciality Metals and joint venture partner CRONIMET.
They are already exploiting a 12-million-tonne waste rock dump from historical mining operations and plan to significantly expand sales of quarry materials from that source, including road base.
A retreatment operation is also underway, extracting tungsten from old tailings.
The JV partners are trialling sensor-based ore sorting to extract +10mm to 40mm high-grade tungsten particles from the low-grade waste rock as another feed source for the processing plant.
And geologists have been busy on site as Speciality Metals reassess the economics of restarting hard-rock mining at Mount Carbine.
“We’re putting in a development team to develop these assets correctly and to ramp them up,” interim chief executive officer Kevin MacNeill said.
“We are also looking at additional assets in Queensland and New South Wales, both in the gold and tungsten sector. We have quite an aggressive plan going forward.”
Mr MacNeill was appointed in May, at the same time that Hatch executive Kim Cavallaro was named as chief commercial officer for SEI.
She will subsequently take over as CEO and managing director, while Mr MacNeill will move into a senior technical role.
“There’s quite a change in the structure of the company to bring it into a more development and production-focused company as opposed to an exploration company,” Mr MacNeill said.
Mount Carbine was discovered at the end of the 19th Century and was a major tungsten producer in the past, although Speciality Metals says the deposit is still relatively unexplored.
In addition to the low-grade waste stockpile the site contains tailings dams with about 2 million tonnes at 0.1 per cent tungsten trioxide (WO3) and about 6 million tonnes of mineralised ore sorting rejects.
There is a JORC compliant inferred resource of 39 million tonnes of hard-rock mineralisation at a grade of 0.14 per cent WO3 adjacent to the existing open pit.
The Speciality Metals-CRONIMET joint venture is producing scheelite and wolframite (forms of tungsten) concentrates at the newly commissioned Mount Carbine retreatment plant.
Mr MacNeill said the site was consistently employing about 30 people between the tailings retreatment operation and the quarry, which recently won a $4 million contract to supply road base.
The next step up in operations is expected to come from the use of sensor-based sorting on the waste rock dump.
Mr MacNeill said the use of sensor based sorting will recover the high-grade pieces of tungsten and divert them for processing in the retreatment plant.
Meanwhile the hard-rock mining potential at the site remains in the exploration phase.
“We have three geologists on site working on the resource – relogging the core and re-assaying the various intersections as a start” Mr MacNeill said.
“We will be coming out with a revised plan once we have a good feel for what’s economic.”
Tungsten is classed as a critical strategic metal, with uses including components for electrical, heating, lighting, and welding applications.
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