Potash West upgrades Dinner Hill Resource

THE DRILL SERGEANT: Potash West (ASX: PWN) has completed a re-estimation of the Dinner Hill phosphate Resource having recently improved the project’s metallurgical flowsheet.

The Dinner Hill project is located 175 kilometres north of Perth in Western Australia, within the company’s Dandaragan Trough project area.

The phosphate Indicated Mineral Resource at the Dinner Hill phosphate deposit has increased to:

120 million tonnes at 2.8 per cent phosphate, 3.1 per cent potassium, and 8.2 per cent calcium.

 

Dinner Hill deposit. Source: Company announcement

 

Last year Potash West completed its initial Scoping Study to produce single superphosphate from the Dandaragan Trough project, however, initial testing and modelling revealed without selectively mining and removing the chalk from the process stream, commodity grade single superphosphate could not be produced due to the high calcite content in the phosphate concentrate.

Based on this data, the calcite rich chalk layer was excluded from the geological model, resulting in a calculation of the Dinner Hill deposit Indicated Mineral Resource of 90 million tonnes at 2.65 per cent phosphate above a 1.85 per cent lower cut-off grade of 1.85 per cent phosphate.
 
In February this year Potash West made a breakthrough in the metallurgical testwork program, which demonstrated the potential to recover phosphate from the chalk by implementing a selective flotation regime.

Based on these results work progressed to revise the Resource to its current level.

“The metallurgical breakthrough we have made with regard to removing the chalk through the processing stream is very significant in that it not only increases the size of the resource and grade of the phosphate at Dinner Hill, it potentially can lead to major mining cost savings through the creation of a simpler mining process, a lower strip ratio and an increased mine life,” Potash West managing director Patrick McManus said in ithe company’s announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange.

“We look forward to further defining this breakthrough and ascertaining its potential benefits across our very large Dandaragan project area.”

Email: info@potashwest.com.au

Website: www.potashwest.com.au