SOPerior Fertilizer Corp. is working on offtake agreements and funding discussions with several international and US-based commodity trading and construction groups for a project to extract alumina and SOP from alunite.
SOPerior Fertilizer plans to produce soluble SOP fertilizer, alumina, and sulfuric acid from its Blawn Mountain project located in Utah, US. Azerbaijan has been doing commercial extraction of alumina and SOP from alunite since the late 1960s. The soluble SOP to be produced has a growing unmet domestic and international market for Fertigation.
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Fertigation requires soluble SOP instead of traditional granular SOP which makes up a large percentage of current domestic supply and is facing falling demand. Alumina is a critical and high demand raw material for the global aluminium supply chains.
The Blawn Mountain Alunite deposit is one of the largest non-bauxite sources of alumina in the US. It was discovered in the 1970s in a search for non-bauxite sources for alumina production to supply to the growing US aluminium industry then. The US has negligible bauxite reserves and has near-total dependence on imported bauxite and alumina for its primary aluminium industry.
The Utah project is permitted for 645 000 tpy SOP, 1st Phase is scaled to 230 000 tpy SOP with modular expansion. Processing alunite generates alumina (US$400+/t), SOP ($650/t), and sulfuric acid (US$100+/tonne). This is the largest undeveloped non-bauxite alumina deposit in North America with 19.4 million tonnes of booked resource with only partial lease explored.
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