Commerce Resources Announces Significant Advancements and Simplification of the Ashram Deposit’s Process Flowsheet

VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 4, 2024 / Commerce Resources Corp. (TSXV:CCE)(FSE:D7H0)(OTCQX:CMRZF) (the "Company" or "Commerce") is pleased to announce that it has made significant advancements in the mineral processing and hydrometallurgical flowsheets for the Ashram Rare Earth and Fluorspar Deposit (the "Ashram 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 is pleased to report a significant simplification and optimization of the Ashram Deposit's front-end mineral processing flowsheet whereby 30-35+% 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 ~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) (see news release dated May 13, 2020). 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 (Figure 1). This downstream testwork has been carried out by Trois-Rivieres-based L3 Process Development ("L3").