Armadale Capital has appointed a Beijing-based marketing consultant on the Tanzanian graphite project. This is for purposes of pursuing their decision to to mine at the Mahenge Liandu graphite project in early 2019.
The firm has also made significant progress on the 2018 field work program underway at Mahenge Liandu. Following the same, Armadale has since appointed Beijing-based marketing consultant Jenny Lee as a consultant to the company.
Lee, who is the current MD of Jialin International Trading, Hong Kong, will manage offtake discussions in Beijing. These will be coordinated alongside test-work from the recently completed diamond drilling and metallurgical program.
According to a released statement from the company, metallurgical test work completed on graphite from Mahenge Liandu indicates that exceptional purity can be achieved alongside excellent flake size distribution. This then makes the product highly amenable to a range of commercial applications.
Moreover, results from a simple conventional flow sheet produced grades well above the standard 95% purity for most size fractions. In addition, downstream test work on concentrates showed excellent expandability particularly of the larger size fractions.
On the other hand, test work to further enhance the purity of the graphite concentrate showed that acid treatment readily upgrades the concentrate further to above the 99.95% purity required for the rapidly expanding lithium-ion battery market.
Armadale director Nick Johansen expressed his optimism on the positive results from the project, citing exceeded expectations from the high grade mineralization identified from surface. Once complete, Mr. Johansen said that they have projected an average production of 49 000 tpa of graphite products during a 32-year life of mine at a low operating cost of US $408/t.
