A processing pathway away from high-energy pyrometallurgical smelting to low-energy hydrometallurgical platinum group metals (PGM) recoveries has been further advanced by Australian PGMs pioneer Podium Minerals.

Podium is reporting a breakthrough in platinum recoveries through a smelterless technology at its Park Reef Platinum Group Metals PGM Project in Western Australia.

The Parks Reef PGM deposit hosts platinum, palladium, rhodium, gold, copper, nickel and cobalt. A mining licence has been approved, native title granted, environmental survey completed, and scoping study advanced.

Podium is making significant progress on a low carbon, lower energy intensive total lifecycle of PGMS.

“For us, it's about a low energy, low carbon footprint for PGMs. It's about meeting some of the supply deficits which are forecast and looking to improve the PGM industry overall,” Podium Minerals MD and CEO Sam Rodda told Mining Weekly in a Zoom interview. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

“We're looking at an opportunity to open up a PGM market and the PGM commodity sector in Australia. We're really making strong advances around a technology that allows us to look at a high-grade product which is suitable for some of the major refineries in Europe,” Rodda added.

When Mining Weekly spoke to Podium in November last year, intensive hydrometallurgical testing was under way, which pointed to smelterless technology ultimately producing material suitable for refinery feed.

The ASX-listed development company has since completed 21 leach optimisation tests, which point to an unlocking of further value at laboratory scale., with continued studies being required before a mineral processing performance can be measured that represents the expected performance of a full-scale operation.

Meanwhile, processing under certain atmospheric leach conditions has achieved platinum recoveries of greater than 90%.

Platinum and iridium recoveries are under the spotlight given that these two PGMs are used in proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysers to produce green hydrogen, and PEM fuel cells required to generate electricity from hydrogen for mobile and stationary offtake.

Parks Reef has an oxide zone to 45 m and a sulphide zone from 45 m to the base of the resource.

“Since November, after our really strong, heavily informed baseline, we've been able to focus on how we optimise and look to optimise value at our Parks Reef project.

“Our focus has been on how we optimise our metal recoveries through our atmospheric leach test, but also continue to consider how to minimise waste through our processing stream and reduce energy through that processing stream.

“The 21 tests focused on all three of those aspects, but particularly around what are the levers required to increase recoveries of metals such as platinum, but also around iridium and rhodium and some of the base metal products we have within our orebody,” said Rodda.

Parks Reef has an oxide zone to 45 m and a sulphide zone from 45 m to the base of the resource.

Mining Weekly: Iridium is a very scarce PGM that is needed to generate green hydrogen and catalyse hydrogen fuel cell technology. Are there indications of significant improvement when it comes to the recovery of iridium?

Rodda: We're seeing the uptake of a iridium along with platinum as critical ingredients to those PEM electrolysers you speak of. It's absolutely important for us to focus on how to optimise recoveries of iridium. Through these last 21 tests, we've seen strong increases around oxide recovery of iridium, and we've seen and started to understand some of those drivers around increasing Iridium recovery in our sulphide. We continue to look to extract as much metal as we can out of our orebody, iridium in particular.

Smelterless technology is very appealing in a South Africa short of electricity, but what has motivated Podium’s focus on hydrometallurgical processing in Western Australia, which has none of South Africa’s power constrain...