The largest nickel deposit in the US, which contains roughly 9.38 billion pounds of the metal, is currently undergoing new extraction tests aimed at recovering seven critical minerals.
The project involves mineral exploration and development firm Alaska Energy Metals Corporation (AEMC) and Canada’s critical mineral refining company RecycLiCo Battery Materials. Teams have reportedly begun testing concentrate samples from the Eureka deposit at the Nikolai Nickel Project.
According to reports, the deposit is the largest known nickel resource in the US. But it also contains cobalt, copper, chromium, platinum, palladium, and gold, alongside iron. The tests will assess whether RecycLiCo’s proprietary hydrometallurgical technology can recover valuable metals from the deposit’s nickel-copper concentrates.
The tests could eventually lead to better metal refining methods and strengthen US supplies of critical minerals. “We are pleased to be assisting AEMC with this important phase of their Nikolai Project,” Richard Sadowsky, RecycLiCo’s interim CEO, pointed out.
The testing is taking place at RecycLiCo’s lab in the city of Delta, British Columbia. The samples were collected during drilling campaigns in both 2023 and 2024. This work follows an earlier agreement between AEMC and RecycLiCo’s US subsidiary.
Under the agreement, the firms are exploring how hydrometallurgical processing could be used to refine concentrates from the Eureka deposit. The method relies on liquid-based chemical reactions to separate and extract metals from mineral concentrates and other materials.
The latest efforts will determine whether the technology can process the deposit’s complex mixture of minerals . AEMC previously reported high metal recovery rates from flotation trials that produced a nickel-copper concentrate.
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