Editorial: The Herald - Zimbabwe
The commissioning of the pilot plant at the Arcadia Lithium Mine near Harare is another large step forward in the growth of Zimbabwe's mining sector and providing a useful and valuable export product, more jobs in the mining sector and diversifying mineral production that will allow Zimbabwe to flourish in a sector with incredible cyclic prices.
The hard rock formations containing both lithium-aluminium silicate minerals, petalite and spodumene, are among the largest in the world. Lithium minerals at commercially exploitable concentrations tend to occur in fairly small deposits which is why a fairly small area of Zimbabwe is rated so highly.
In recent decades, the large brine deposits, concentrated where Peru, Chile and Bolivia meet, took over large sections of the growing global markets, but the advances in lithium ion batteries since their first commercial production in the early 1990s, and especially the technology demands for the electric car businesses, put a premium on the product from hard rock deposits.
The low-iron hard-rock lithium minerals from Zimbabwe are saleable at a profit even when prices are volatile, and lithium is a mineral that has seen prices double and halve during a year. Prices, as consumption rises, are expected to be far more stable and gradually rise.
The miners are planning to process the ore they dig out of the open cast pits right down to the basic pure petalite and spodumene crystals, through a double process, although Prospect Resources has already done work on extending this to producing lithium carbonate.
The processes will also allow a useful amount of tantalum, a valuable metal that is used to make the micro-capacitors in many electronics, to be recovered, adding yet another mineral to Zimbabwe's production list.
Economically, there are a number of important points to note. While Prospect Resources had been investigating the ore body, it was not until the Second Republic and the moves to making Zimbabwe open for business that caused the company to start sinking money into the future mine.
The full national project status, and then the rapid results initiative, have been clearly stated by the company as critical to moving into the investment stage.
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