Rio Tinto, Fortune Minerals collaborate on critical minerals recovery
Rio Tinto and Canadian mining company Fortune Minerals have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaborate on the development of new technology aimed at improving the recovery of critical minerals.
The collaboration aligns with the Canadian and US governments’ Joint Action Plan on Critical Mineral Collaboration, signed in 2020, which aims to promote the production of critical minerals within North America to support sustainable energy resources and new technologies.
Scope of partnership
The goal of this partnership is to maximize the value of the critical mineral supply chain, including cobalt and bismuth. The MoU will see the firms conduct tests at Rio Tinto’s Kennecott integrated copper mining and smelting operations in Utah, USA, as well as at Fortune Minerals’ planned refinery in Alberta, Canada.
Fortune Minerals will process co-product streams of minerals recovered at Rio Tinto’s Kennecott smelter in their cobalt and bismuth refining operations. Various process methods and techs will be assessed for recovering minerals from Kennecott’s smelter waste streams. This includes blending Rio Tinto’s intermediate products with NICO project concentrates and using Fortune’s refinery flow sheets for batch recovery tests.
Rio Tinto’s Kennecott integrated operations near Salt Lake City have a history of mining and processing various minerals, including copper, gold, silver, molybdenum, and tellurium. On the other hand, Fortune Minerals is developing a vertically integrated NICO cobalt-gold-bismuth-copper project in Canada, including a planned mine, mill, concentrator, and hydrometallurgical refinery in Alberta. Cobalt and bismuth are critical minerals with significant roles in sustainable energy resources and emerging technologies.
