Geomega Provides Update on Demo Plant, Project Design Change and Start of Site Preparation Activities at Saint-Hubert Facility - Seite 2

Geomega’s engineering team believes that there are advantages to the change to continuous design:

• Continuous design is usually preferred over batch design in industrial operations and was the ultimate goal for the project in the long-term. Switching to this design now is much more applicable to the long-term market targeted by the Corporation, namely swarf recycling from NdFeB magnet factories that are being planned for Europe and North America. The first priority of the demonstration plant remains to process end of life and scrap magnets.
• Continuous design simplifies the control system, improves the quality of the product and, therefore, has advantages on both the operating and capital costs of the demonstration plant.
• The smaller equipment should have better availability with shorter lead times which should help the project to remain within the Corporation’s timeline for the rare earths recycling demonstration plant.
  

Geomega is aware that such a major design change may result in significant risks. The following are some of the primary risks that were considered and are being addressed by the management and engineering teams at Geomega:

• Engineering – Batch to continuous design change is an important modification and requires a major rework of engineering documentation. The current detailed engineering package can no longer be used for construction as is, except for some sections. The new engineering package will be using components from the previous design and will help reduce some delays.
• Procurement – The design change has a major impact on size of equipment and on equipment selection. An ongoing procurement review has already identified equipment that has been purchased and received but is no longer needed for the continuous design and has been already put for sale. Other equipment that has been ordered but not yet received was cancelled. Replacement equipment is being selected as part of the ongoing engineering rework and will be ordered as soon as possible.
• Piloting – The batch process was piloted in 2019 and 2020 with the main objective of scaling it up and then converting to continuous process. Implementing the scale up of the process and switching from batch to continuous in one step is not optimal. On the other hand, the Corporation’s R&D team has been working over the last year on continuous piloting in other similar processes. That experience gained provides the management and engineering teams with the confidence that the continuous process now proposed for the rare earths recycling demonstration plant should achieve the set product targets.
• Feed material – Dealing with end-of-life material always had a risk of feed variability which is better to adjust to with a batch design. Switching to continuous design requires a more uniform feed which may have an impact on sourcing of material and might require blending and preparation of feed in a way that will not impose significant changes on the operation conditions.

For ease of reference, a comparison between batch and continuous design is presented in the table below: