I am so happy to have Helen Geling with us today. 

Helen has had an extensive career as an exploration geologist and exploration manager for explorers, producers, and the director of Minerals geoscience for the Geological survey of Queensland and since May this year she's the project acquisition manager for Cobalt Blue. 

I'm super excited that she'll be chatting about her work on Cobalt Blue's Waste Streams project about battery metals from mine waste, and Australia's green opportunity.

This is going to be an awesome session. Please use the chat and we'll open up the floor at the end. And thank you so, so much, Helen, for joining. I love having you here. 

Thanks for asking me back. I think this is my third time on Geo Hug, which is pretty cool and just love that all these things that we started in COVID are still going and part of our everyday life now anyway.

I'm especially excited to be here in my new role with Cobalt Blue and I'm going to tell you all about our critical minerals in mine Waste Project, which we are aiming to set up globally. 

By the time I'm finished, I hope that you'll all come away with a strong sense of opportunity that exists here in Australia and around the world, for reprocessing mine waste, such as tailings, but there's other types of waste as well for critical mineral value, but also at the same time, getting better environmental outcomes for those sites. 

Whilst those energy solutions may in themselves emit far less carbon dioxide than fossil fuel energy generation, they are actually far more metals intensive than those traditional energy generation methods.

So these graphs are from the International Energy Agency. And they show the amount of metal required for green energy solutions compared or compared with traditional fossil fuel based technologies. 

So the graph on the left, shows a typical electric vehicle EV compared with a more conventional car, internal combustion engine. 

And the bottom access of that graph shows kilograms per vehicle of different metals. 

So you can see that the EV requires so much more metal than the conventional combustion engine car. 

And all of the energy solutions and energy applications need copper because that's how we transmit and move electricity around.

But, the batteries, the frame of the car, the way the whole thing is set up requires huge amount of other metals that we've just not really used a lot of in the past. And now of course, we don't have enough. 

On the right is a comparison of different energy generation options, including offshore wind, onshore wind, solar, nuclear, and coal and natural gas, down the bottom comparison.

And so this graph shows the kilograms of metal required per megawatt of power being generated. And again, you can see that wind just requires so much more metal, a megawatt than natural gas or coal. All of them need copper, but the amounts are just so much bigger. 

How we achieve the energy transition whilst maintaining all of the environmental, societal, and climate goals that we desire and that are important to us. 

I think it's the challenge of today's mining, metals and manufacturing industries. We also know that with, even with the best of intentions, we can't reach these metal demands through recycling alone.

So, we do need new mines and new sources of these metals, but we don't really want to start just mining frantically all over the place and abandoning our strong environmental practices for the sake of mining as much as we can, as quickly as we can. 

So. Instead, I'm hoping that today I can show you how we can be far more efficient with the mines and the deposits that we already have.

Right?

So this is a graph that was produced by the International Council on Mining and Metals, ICMM in 2022. It shows the breakdown of tailings volumes produced by key commodity streams. 

So we've got Illumina, we've got gold, coal iron ore, nickel, and the largest one is copper. 

According to this study, 3.4 billion tons of tailings was produced annually in 2019 from copper mines alone.

If you add in nickel, we're up to about 5.5 billion tons per year of tailings production. 

The graph also shows the increase in tailings production over time from 2010 to 2018. 

And we see that that happens because of globally declining grades, first of all, of the biggest deposits. So we need to dig up more in order to get the same amount of metal, and that's weighed against the increasing demand, which is driven largely by the need for copper and nickel in the energy transition. 

So the volume of tailings produced per ton of metal is only increasing. And this data, this graph is already four or five years old. So the total here of about 9.5 billion tons across those six commodities is actually only now going to be an a massive underestimate.

We also know that nature doesn't make things 100% pure and there are other commodities mixed in with these copper, nickel and other mines commodities, such as cobalt. 

So in many cases, the coexisting commodities are not, or they were not previously of interest to the incumbent miner.

So the people that did the original mining were not interested in the metals that are now so important to us. And so they have over time ended up in the waste. 

So the idea of the work that I'm focused on, and many others, of course, is to reframe this huge environmental burden into an opportunity for green battery, metal production.

For the energy transition, that is the global scene setting. 

What have we got here in Australia in particular? 

We have a very active and very proud mining history. We have huge natural mineral endowment. We're very lucky that way, and mining is a very significant part of our economy. 

This map on the screen is from Geoscience Australia from the Atlas of Mine Waste Portal, which was released I think in about May this year.

And it shows the mine waste sites that we actually have data for thus far. 

And it is mine waste associated with both operating and historical mines. So for some sites that might be a tailing stand. For others it might be spent heat leach, but yet more it might be a low grade stockpile, some other kind of storage pile or dump.

Sites might have been rehabilitated. They may not yet have been rehabilitated, but whatever the case, they're going to require ongoing environmental management. 

In many cases, chances are that there is still significant metal and other raw material value remaining in those waste stockpiles.

This map shows about 1500 individual mine waste sites. 

However, we actually know that this is a significant underestimate, because we just haven't got a lot of the data that we need and the number should actually be more likely round, double that, if not more. 

When I was talking to Geoscience Australia, a little while ago, they've conservatively estimated that there are approximately 3,500 mine waste sites across all commodities Australia wide.

But that is a lot.

I think that we can be smarter with that waste. We can look at ways of turning this massive liability into something more valuable, which of course then brings mining activity into the circular economy, where there is no waste, and all materials are viewed as having value. 

Cobalt is obviously a focus for us at cobalt blue, but the opportunities are broader than that.

There are many other valuable metals and raw materials that also occur in waste, and that might include sulphur from pyrite, for example. And I have a specific reason for mentioning that because at cobalt blue we recognize the huge potential for cobalt pyrite in the world's large copper nickel deposits.

The majority of that pyrite has ended up in waste, stockpiles and tailing dumps because it's too difficult to process. 

And historically, before the energy transition became important to society, the demand for that metal just wasn't there. We also know that pyrite tailings is one of the world's major sources of acid mine drainage associated with mining operations.

So getting that pyrite out and turning it into useful products has not only economic value, but very strong positive environmental outcomes as well. 

So with all of that kind of background and scene setting, I would now like to talk a little bit about Cobalt blue. 

We're an Australian company with a cobalt in pyrite deposit in New South Wales, which we call the Broken Hill Cobalt Project.

And we are developing a cobalt and nickel sulfate refinery in Western Australia. 

So the Broken Hill Cobalt project, in New South Wales is currently undergoing DFS to secure finance and it will produce a mixed hydroxide precipitate from the cobalt in pyrite ore body. 

That material will then be fed to the nickel and cobalt refinery in Ana, which will also be able to take material from other sites around Australia and potentially the Asia Pacific region.

And then the third pillar of the company's business strategy where I come in is to develop additional sites that Cobalt blue in Australia and around the world through the reprocessing of mine waste. 

So our Waste Streams project is standalone and on a global scale. It doesn't necessarily rely on infrastructure in Australia, but if the opportunity is there, then of course we'll feed into that too.

A little bit of flow sheet, which is all new to me because I'm an exploration geologist by background, but I'm learning very hard about metallurgy. 

So it's just geochemistry really. Which is good. The cobalt blue process lends itself to the mine waste application because of the very strong focus on sulfides, particularly pyrite, which tend to be concentrated in waste stockpiles such as tailing dams.

Um, so this is our flow sheet here as it would be applied in a mine waste scenario.

So the one that you might see on our website, for the Broken Hill project has a lot more detail around it because it's very specific to that site.

So the sulfide waste is generated through previous or ongoing mining activity. 

At Broken Hill, we do gravity separation. We're assuming that we could do something similar at other sites. And then we make it a concentrate. We then feed that through a stage where we are converting the PY into Tite. And as part of that, we also make elemental sulfur as a by product.

And just as a a little side note, Australia is a net importer of sulphur and, and sulphuric acid. So it's not a hugely valuable product in and of itself, but if we have a domestic source rather than having to import something that's not really worth a lot, then that's obviously a much better scenario for everybody.

Okay, so we've made our elemental sulphur. We've done the calcining, and we go through a series of leach steps. We also produce elemental sulphur as well as an iron rich residue, and then out of that we make the final mixed hydroxide precipitate containing both cobalt and nickel.

And then we will refine that to make intermediate cobalt or nickel sulfate, via the refinery. 

So that is metallurgy 101. 

Here are our final products. The mixed hydroxide precipitate, which contains both nickel and cobalt is the green stuff on the left.

And we can then refine that at the refinery to cobalt and nickel sulfate, which is a step further along the material needs to go into a battery. 

And that's the reddish stuff. And then our by product is elemental sulphur, it just means you turn it into little pea-sized or even smaller.

And that can be safely stored or stockpiled. It's completely benign. It's not like sulfuric acid. 

This stuff is really safe. You can stick your fingers in it and you know you're stupid. Maybe you could lick it, but it's not going to cause environmental damage if there's some kind of accident and it spills. 

That can be used in the, in the fertiliser industry from phosphate deposits for example.

And then that is a good story because then that feeds into supporting action against global food shortage. 

So our waste streams project aims to generate opportunities for the reprocessing and mine waste to extract these valuable battery minerals, but then also removing the sulphur from the mine site at the same time, or the waste site.

We work with existing operations and incumbent companies to develop collaborative relationships to, to be able to realize this secondary metal extraction. Aiming basically to turn trash into treasure. And, hopefully we will also realise the positive environmental outcomes for the existing sites and then their associated communities.

So that helps to boost the ESG credentials of not only the battery material that we produce, but also the sites and the companies that we partner with. 

Again, we do this by being collaborative. We have existing collaborations with the Queensland government and through them, the University of Queensland.

And we also have a number of both public and private collaborations with companies to examine waste at specific sites and to develop a body of analytical processing data, to demonstrate the efficacy of our processing technique across a number of sites because each one has their own mineralogical and chemical characteristics.

We don't treat it as a black box where this is how we do it and we can't do it any other way. 

We try and sort of tweak things to be specific to each site. 

We've got two examples of work that we are doing. 

One is through the Queensland government and the University of Queensland collaboration, and this is test work that we've done at the Osborne site in Northwest Queensland, and that's an iron oxide copper gold deposit.

You can see the tailings facilities in the image there and the information that I'm showing is with permission from the Geological Survey of Queensland. 

And the recovery results of the test work that cobalt blue undertook is shown on the right. 

Again, I'm not a metallurgist, I'm not going to go into the full details of the test work, you know, other than it followed that flow sheet that I talked you through just a moment ago. 

The test work came off pretty well. We achieved 90% recovery of cobalt from the Osborne samples using the cobalt blue process, which is the one that I've highlighted with the little green box. We can publicly demonstrate that this process works on deposits other than the Broken Hill project.

We've got this one down in New South Wales, but we can actually apply this to a whole range of other deposit styles. So this is really good news for other pyrite rich tailings facilities, whether they're in Australia or elsewhere around the world.

I do want to emphasise that this work was done as a research project with Queensland Government and the University of Queensland.

The sorts of outcomes that we are hoping to achieve with this program. It doesn't have to be focused on contained middle value. So sometimes the value of a path of action is actually in reducing historical harm or the potential for future harm, and that's what we have in this example here. So earlier this year, Cobalt Blue announced a test work collaboration with HUD Bay Minerals in Canada to look at the potential for cobalt blues process to extract elemental sulphur from mine tailings in Manitoba.

The mine there has actually closed but only in the last 18 months, two years, but it operated in various guises for nearly a hundred years and it produced mainly copper and zinc. 

There's actually not a lot of cobalt there. It's a copper, zinc, silver mine. But what remains is the huge tailings dam, which you can see in this picture here, and it has approximately 85 million tons of sulphur bearing waste associated with that site, which is now closed. 

It's not generating further income for the company, but it does have a significant and very long-lived environmental bond which is the same sort of thing that we have with sites here in Australia. 

So by demonstrating that we can extract elemental sulphur, which again is a by product of our patented process.

We can show the potential for desulfphurisation of this style of acid forming legacy site worldwide. 

You can see in this image as well, there's a town, like a lot of other Australian mining towns, except it's in Canada and it's a lot colder.

This is the town of Flynn Flaw. It's a really old site and the town has just sort of grown up around the edges of that. 

So people are living very, very close to this nasty site with a lot of environmental legacy. 

So by reprocessing this material, we can generate some valuable copper, zinc, and silver and whatever else is in the tailing dam as credits.

But we're also going to produce the sulphur. Which is those little yellow balls that I showed you before. That is a saleable product. 

So also generating value, but at the same time, reducing the site's environmental liability. 

So in some ways it's a completely different way of looking at a business proposition because we are reducing the risk.

And it's reducing the amount of that bond that's tied up that the company can't access for other investments.

And then coming back to Australia, this map shows the Australian operating and Legacy Mines and it's coloured by commodity and I couldn't quite get the original mine Atlas waste Atlas on GA's site to then show me this kind of thing, but I just wanted to demonstrate one of these coloured by commodity.

So, red is iron ore, yellow is gold and silver, the bluey colours are base metals including copper and zinc. And the green is battery metals, which is nickel, cobalt, manganese, and a bunch of other stuff. So, the idea is to look at this and say, okay, this is broadly where the gold is.

This is where the copper is, the grey is coal. But not one of these deposits will have been purely gold or purely copper or purely zinc and so on. 

So, you know, cobalt blue, the name already tells you we're interested in cobalt. 

So knowing the characteristics of key deposit types then really helps us to build a model to predict which sites are most likely to have cobalt or nickel,, and that cobalt or nickel is in need of rescuing. 

Rescuing from a dirty, great tailings dam. 

Somebody used the word rescuing critical minerals.

By being a bit predictive, we can narrow the search space from over 3,500 sites to a few tens of sites by understanding the characteristics of the original deposit and then predicting what might have gone into the waste.

A lot of the data that we need to characterize waste is still in the early stages of being collected. 

Anita Fox's group at the University of Queensland is leading the way with that data collection helped by all the state surveys, surveys, and Geo Science Australia, but a lot of it's still being collected. 

It's not public yet. What we can't do is predict things like cobalt content in waste based on the historical production data of the original mine, which would've been very focused on copper, nickel, whatever the focus of that original site was, because in 99% of cases, there was never a formal cobalt resource on that site.

There was certainly no production processing or recovery data. So we've got no starting point, and there’s no way to predict what the chemistry of the waste is outside of the original commodity. 

That was the focus of that mine site. But the data is definitely slowly growing, which is awesome, and that's a great thing for having a more efficient and circular mining industry in Australia.

With the right partnerships, we hope to demonstrate domestic battery metal production, generating a local and ethical supply of critical raw materials for the Australian battery industry, which is still in it in its infancy, but growing all the time.

We hear governments talking about battery hubs all the time. 

So at the same time as doing that, we can produce the elemental sulphur, which feeds into the fertiliser industry amongst others. Because we do that, we're generating positive environmental outcomes for problematic mine sites.

So there's a lot going on and I'm going to leave it there.