Cobalt Blue Holdings

Cobalt is a critical mineral in strong demand for new generation batteries, particularly lithium-ion batteries now being widely used in clean energy systems. Cobalt Blue Holdings is an exploration and project development company. Work programs advancing the Broken Hill Cobalt Project in New South Wales are in progress. The operation is large-scale and will be one of the largest cobalt producers in the world. If Broken Hill were a country, it would rank number 5 for cobalt production.

Cobalt Blue’s strategic focus is on the battery industry and producing a battery-ready cobalt product at sufficient purity to enter the production chain directly, increasing the revenue and margins.

The Broken Hill Cobalt Project is located approximately 25 km southwest of Broken Hill, in far western New South Wales. The Project covers an area of roughly 37km² within a broader tenement holding of almost 220km².

The deposits are characterised by moderate to steep dipping stratabound zones of disseminated to semi-massive cobaltiferous pyrite mineralisation. This forms 3 distinct bodies known as Pyrite Hill, Big Hill, and Railway. This unique mineralogical composition distinguishes the Broken Hill Cobalt Project deposits from the more traditional method of producing cobalt as a concentrate by-product (from either copper or nickel mines), or as a mixed hydroxide or sulphide intermediate. In both cases, the payable cobalt content is a fraction of the metal value.

The Broken Hill Cobalt Project is an integrated mine-refinery concept. The commercial strategy is to extract the maximum cobalt margin in a rapidly changing global market for cobalt. As demand for particular forms of cobalt wax and wane, so too will the production outcomes, which can produce a mixed hydroxide product (MHP) or cobalt sulphate (CoSO4).

In 2022 Cobalt Blue commissioned a Demonstration Plant (~A$10 million investment) that comprises two phases of operations. Firstly, mined ore will be crushed, milled and treated to produce a cobalt-pyrite concentrate at the Pyrite Hill site. Secondly, the concentrate will then be trucked to the Demonstration Plant in Broken Hill for extraction and recovery of cobalt as MHP and/or cobalt sulphate.

Product & Annual Production Rate

• 3,500 tonnes per annum cobalt metal as 10,000 tonnes per annum MHP or 16,700 tonnes per annum CoSO4
• 300,000 tonnes per annum elemental sulfur

Mine

The Broken Hill Cobalt Project considers a multi-open pit mining scenario that will extract ore using conventional drill and blast, load and haul, and dump processes. The operation is planned to use excavators and rigid body trucks along with a fleet of auxiliary equipment.

Up to 6.3 million tonnes of ore will be hauled annually to a stockpile area proximal to the processing plant located centrally to the pits. Waste material will be hauled to the waste emplacements situated close to each pit.

Refinery

While all of these processes exist in mining around the world - this is the first time they have been brought together in an innovation that is unlocking cobalt from pyrite in these steps:

Ore is crushed to approx. 1 mm, and a pyrite concentrate is recovered using a combination of gravity and flotation unit operations. The pyrite concentrate is thermally treated under an inert atmosphere to produce artificial pyrrhotite (calcine) and elemental sulphur. The sulphur is condensed from the kiln off-gas and turned into solid prills. The pyrrhotite is forwarded to a low-temperature, low-pressure autoclave for leaching. The leach residue is removed by filtration and further processed for sulphur recovery by remelting. The leach solutions are advanced through various minor metals removal steps (precipitation, ion exchange, and solvent extraction) to remove iron, copper, zinc, and manganese. The cobalt and nickel are precipitated as a mixed-hydroxide (MHP) intermediate. The MHP is then refined for the production of high purity cobalt sulphate heptahydrate. The target recovery from ore to product for cobalt is 85–90%.

Advantages

The operation is large-scale and will be one of the largest cobalt producers in the world. In fact, if Broken Hill were a country, it would rank number 5 for cobalt production.

The operation is low-cost. The process separates over 80% of the waste from the ore at the first step. This means COB will refine less than 20% of the material brought out of the ground. The refinery then processes a 0.5% cobalt content concentrate.

The operation is well-serviced. The mine will have a direct connection to rail transport, power, and water.

There is a local workforce, many of whom are seasoned, well-trained mining industry professionals.

There is the location of the mine itself, which sits just 25 kilometres outside Broken Hill and is linked by established rail and highways – both essential for access to the mine site and export of their market-ready products.

There is also the Project’s proximity to a dedicated water supply, power, and even a potential source of wholesale reusable energy from wind or solar generation nearby.

Then there is the cobalt processing technology itself. Each stage of the process already exists and is in commercial operation around the globe. However, we are the first to ‘book-end’ the parts of the process together and engineer them to extract cobalt. The Company’s process is the only one of its kind in the world. The way it effectively and efficiently extracts cobalt from pyrite and difficult host minerals is a game-changer.

Government recognition

In March 2022, the Broken Hill Cobalt Project achieved Major Project Status through the Federal Government. This recognises the economic significance of the project through its contribution to growth, productivity, government revenue, industry and regional development.

In April 2022, the Australian Government awarded Cobalt Blue Holdings $15m through the Critical Minerals Accelerator Initiative for the Broken Hill Cobalt Project. This funding will enable Cobalt Blue to accelerate the development of the project by expanding the scope of Feasibility Studies, bringing forward infrastructure and services work packages, and decreasing start-up commissioning risks.

Further potential

The Demonstration Plant, after completion of mine site ore and processing testing, will then evolve into a Broken Hill-based metallurgical testing centre. The plant will become focussed upon the extraction of metals from sulphide mineralisation commonly found in waste rock and tailings dams and will be tasked with testwork up to and including Bankable Feasibility Study (BFS) scale (>1,000t material).

To date COB has tested four different samples from South Australia and Queensland and delivered similar handling and recovery outcomes to their own Broken Hill Cobalt Project material. Desktop studies have revealed a significant amount of copper and cobalt locked in these waste streams with estimates that Queensland alone has >200,000t of cobalt locked in these streams. Currently COB is finalising testwork under an MOU with Queensland Dept of Resources. This testwork will provide a further understanding of the technical and potential commercial outcomes available.