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Physical beneficiation of the Iron Creek cobalt deposit via flotation
Brevig, Mason
Brevig, Mason
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2023
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2025-06-24
Abstract
Cobalt is a critical material as designated by the United States Department of Energy. It is used in electric vehicles as a cathode material and in high strength steels as an alloying addition. The United States currently relies nearly 100% on imports and secondary scrap materials for refined cobalt consumption. Because of this, efforts to establish a domestic supply for cobalt are being pursued. This thesis describes research into sortation and flotation to improve one such effort by Electra Battery Materials through the Iron Creek, ID deposit.
Coarse material sortation was tested in order to determine its viability, specifically the viability of XRT sensor-based sorting on Iron Creek material. The sortation testing was successful as low-grade material was able to be separated from rocks that had higher cobalt and copper grades. Rougher flotation testing was used to ascertain the most appropriate conditions for particle size, collector type, and collector dosage. A cobalt grade of approximately 1.8% was achieved with a recovery of nearly 92.0% using rougher flotation. Differential flotation testing was undergone to obtain separate copper and cobalt concentrates by depressing the pyrite at a PH of 11.5. Separate cobalt and copper concentrates were obtained with the copper concentrate having a cobalt recovery of 3.98% and a copper recovery of nearly 20%. Cleaner flotation at high PH was undergone to further recovery cobalt from the differential flotation copper concentrate. Re-grinding to a particle size P80=80 microns aided in the recovery of cobalt to the cobalt concentrate as the final copper concentrate from cleaner flotation had only 0.27% cobalt recovery. Locked cycle testing was also conducted to simulate an industrial flotation operation with results supporting the implementation of an industrial flotation circuit for the recovery of cobalt and copper as separate products.
An overall economic analysis incorporating sortation, flotation, thermal degradation, and magnetic separation was constructed. The economic analysis showed that the process was economical and a positive NPV of $35.2 million (+ or – 35%) indicated that the project should be pursued at the industrial level.
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