REE Projects
Meeting the global REE supply shortage before 2014
Medallion Resources is challenging the current practice of rare-earth juniors, which are focused on tackling hard-rock occurrences with complex metallurgy, to achieve significant near-term production. Medallion’s approach is to apply simple and well-known processing techniques to extract rare earths from the mineral monazite. Monazite is a rare-earth phosphate mineral commonly produced and discarded by mineral sands mines around the world.
Since monazite is a by-product of existing billion-tonne mineral-sands mining operations, it is available in large quantities at a reasonable cost. Medallion is actively looking to find and acquire large-tonnage, high-value rare-earth deposits with simple metallurgical properties that are located near infrastructure and can be quickly brought into production. Medallion’s criteria for acquisitions, which lead to low-cost sustainable rare-earth supplies, emphasize the following:
- Near-term production.
- Large surface deposits.
- Simple metallurgy.
- Traditional, yet presently ignored rare-earth sources.
This approach, if successful, could advance Medallion’s production schedule well ahead of the other potential rare-earth producers, which are attempting to solve the complex metallurgy of multi-mineral hard-rock deposits.
Medallion Looking Forward:
- Focus on monazite from mineral sands deposits, as its technical team continues to evaluate and explore untapped sources of rare-earths.
- Negotiate and finalize partnerships or purchase agreements to support and build a monazite processing facility to produce rare-earths.
- Engage with rare-earth refiners and other end users to secure a market for its monazite-processing-facility output.
