Commerce Resources Corp. announced that it has made significant advancements in the mineral processing and hydrometallurgical flowsheets for the Ashram Rare Earth and Fluorspar Deposit. The Ashram Deposit, wholly owned by the Company and located in Quebec, Canada, is one of the largest undeveloped monazite dominant rare earth deposits in the world.

This rare earth mineralogy results in significant NdPr distributions (>20%). The company reported a significant simplification and optimization of the Ashram Deposit's front-end mineral processing flowsheetwhereby30-35+% REO monazite mineral concentrates at strong recovery (between 60-70%) are produced using only flotation. This testwork has been completed at bench scale, is demonstrated repeatable, and has been scaled up successfully from approximately 1 kg to 10 kg floats using conventional mechanical flotation cells.

The recent testwork, which uses readily available reagents, has been carried out by SGS Canada in Lakefield, Ontario ("SGS"), and builds upon the beneficiation testwork carried out by CanmetMINING, a branch of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan). This new flowsheet is a significant simplification, with comparable performance, to the prior flotation-leach-magnetic separation flowsheet. The recent results represent some of the best grade/recovery performance for bench scale tests on material from the Ashram Deposit.

Further optimization testing is pending, including Locked-Cycle Testing (LCT) to confirm closed circuit recoveries, and variability testing on nine (9) samples prepared from drill core spatially distributed throughout the deposit. In addition to the mineral processing developments, a streamlined hydrometallurgical flowsheet has also been developed and demonstrated at bench scale for the downstream processing of the monazite flotation concentrate produced by SGS. The hydrometallurgical flowsheet uses a standard acid bake - water leach process followed by thorium removal and direct rare earth element ("REE") precipitation.

This downstream testwork has been carried out by Trois-Rivieres-based L3 Process Development (L3). This streamlined hydrometallurgical flowsheet developed and demonstrated by L3 on the SGS monazite concentrates achieved an overall recovery into solution for NdPr above 95% and TbDy above 82% while significantly reducing sulfuric acid consumption. The thorium was fully removed from the water leach solution using a three-stage solvent extraction process.

The REEs were then precipitated using oxalic acid and converted to carbonates using a 1-step metathesis process, achieving an overall recovery (deposit material to marketable mixed rare earth elements product) of over 62% NdPr. In addition to the oxalate and carbonate REE precipitates, the downstream flowsheet is amenable to producing a mixed rare earth oxide ("mixed REO"), thereby providing significant flexibility in end-user offtake preferences and shipping optimization. The Ashram Deposit ranks as one of the largest REE deposits globally, consisting of a monazite dominated, single mineralized body outcropping at surface, and has a footprint approximately 700 m along strike, over 300 m across, and 600 m deep, remaining open in several directions.

Therefore, the deposit is envisioned to be an open-pit extraction operation at production, with a very low strip ratio. Coupled with a monazite rare earth mineralogy and strong NdPr distributions, these attributes allow for the company to have significant flexibility in flowsheet design, whereby a 60+% overall recovery of the NdPr into saleable product is significant. The new mineral processing flowsheet will permit an operator to leverage the size of the deposit and optimize mining for effective recovery into a high-grade monazite concentrate in order to significantly simplify and thereby reduce project mineral processing and downstream hydromet CAPEX and OPEX.