Queensland Bauxite looks to feasibility study, off-take at South Johnstone

Queensland Bauxite has returned more positive test results on bauxite from its South Johnstone bauxite project with total alumina ranging from 32% to 38%.

South Johnstone represents a new potentially high grade bauxite region, remarkably close to established infrastructure.

Significantly, an independent feasibility study is in the offing to look at development options for the initial 30 million tonne resource to and evaluate early mining at South Johnstone given demand resulting from the ban by Indonesia on export of unprocessed ores.

The study would also look to establish production targets.

As well, already off-take alternatives are being reviewed, pointing to the perceived quality of the project.

Notably, the X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) tests show that the bauxite is likely to be mostly gibbsite.

Gibbsite hosted bauxite is generally preferred by bauxite refineries due to the ability to recover the alumina at a lower temperature in the Bayer process, hence resulting in a lower refining cost.

The total alumina lies in the range from 32% to 38% Al2O3 and these results compare directly with the results obtained by Carpentaria Exploration Company.

Samples are currently being tested using X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) to confirm their mineralogy.

Results received by QBL to date are from only 2.3% of the 400km2 of tenement area at South Johnstone; a 30 million tonne bauxite resource has been defined already.

The previous exploration target has been surpassed providing large upside in possible bauxite resources based on geological expectations.

This looks to be a small tip of a very large iceberg. On current results the geological target looks likely to be sitting at higher than a previous exploration target of 250 million tonnes at the project.

Ready infrastructure
The project is situated just 16 kilometres west of the deep water port of Mourilyan in North Queensland.

There is a narrow gauge railway which runs through the tenement to the port of Mourilyan and a network of bitumen and gravel roads within the tenement that lead to the port.

Analysis
Although there has been some short term loss of bandwidth over the past two weeks, which in the scheme of things means little today's results and news provide a significant momentum builder at South Johnstone.

Given the closeness of the project to road, port and Asian markets, QBL is in the enviable position of moving directly to carve-out early mining and export options - rare for a junior.

We find current price of $0.015 is a pittance relative to our medium term to long term valuation range.