The Australia-based ABx Group has revealed that ALCORE, its 83 per cent stake subsidiary, has successfully conducted three test runs under standard process conditions following the activation of its state-of-the-art bath pilot batch reactor. Located at the ALCORE Technology Centre on the NSW Central Coast, the reactor is specifically designed to extract fluorine from an 'excess bath,' a waste product from aluminium smelting, to generate hydrogen fluoride. When operating at a commercial scale, a portion of the hydrogen fluoride will undergo further processing through an existing commercial method to produce aluminium fluoride, a high-value chemical crucial for aluminium smelting, which is currently entirely imported.
The recently developed reactor is roughly ten times larger than the Company's previous laboratory-scale reactor. Each operation has utilized approximately 10 kg of bath and sulfuric acid. After two runs and some minor equipment adjustments, the reactor is now functioning according to design, particularly excelling in achieving improved process mixing.
Hydrogen fluoride gas has been successfully generated in each of the test runs. In the latest run, a quantity of metal sulfate powder was produced, resembling the powder obtained through manual methods with smaller reactors. These manual methods extracted over 90 per cent of fluorine. This outcome instils confidence in the enhanced process mixing, indicating a higher fluorine yield in a single pass—a crucial advancement in the ongoing scale-up of the ALCORE process.
Samples of the produced powder from the runs have been dispatched to an external laboratory for fluorine content measurement to validate the fluorine yield. The results from these independent assessments are expected in January 2024.
Dr Mark Cooksey, the Managing Director and CEO of ABx Group, commented on the reactor performance, saying, "The scale-up of this technology is all about process and equipment validation at increasing scales of operation, increasingly providing us with certainty that our world-first process can be efficiently and effectively scaled up to the commercial operation. Since conducting our first runs with this significantly larger batch reactor in November, we have demonstrated that we can run the reactor safely under standard process conditions and produce hydrogen fluorine. Now we see evidence that it can produce the all-important higher fluoride yield that underpins commercial production."
“Greater certainty of our progress will be provided in January with the receipt of assay results. I am exceptionally pleased with the acceleration of ALCORE’s activities and look forward to further runs of the batch reactor, as every run offers further insights into the design for the next critical stage of development – the continuous pilot plant.”
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