South Star Battery Metals Announces Commencement of Preliminary Economic Assessment for the BamaStar Graphite Project in Coosa County, Alabama, USA - Seite 2

Richard Pearce, CEO of South Star, commented, "We are pleased to kickoff the PEA for BamaStar and to advance the project together with our partners. The PEA is expected to take approximately three to four months to complete, and we believe it will present a robust scenario with two scalable mines producing high-quality concentrates and a value-add plant in the middle of one of the most critical EV, defense, and energy storage corridors in the U.S. At a time of increasing geopolitical risks and supply-chain concerns regarding critical metals and the energy transition, it's great to be one of the first movers advancing a phased, vertically integrated graphite supply chain with near-term production and high-quality assets in Tier 1 jurisdictions in the Americas."

In addition, 10 kg of Santa Cruz material is being tested as part of ongoing characterization and optimization of the Santa Cruz graphite concentrates for battery applications for the Company's US downstream transformational technologies technical program. Currently, Santa Cruz graphite concentrate is being analyzed, purified, transformed and upgraded to produce a variety of different products, including CSPG.

As part of that ongoing characterization, the as-received Santa Cruz graphite concentrate was recently imaged using scanning electron microscop ("SEM"), as shown in the Figure 1 below.

Foto: Accesswire

Figure 1: The SEM image on the above left is of South Star's >96% Cg graphite concentrate from the Santa Cruz Graphite Mine in Brazil. The SEM image on the above right is of the EXACT same material as in the image on the left, imaged concurrently, but utilizing a SEM backscattered electron detector. Backscattered electron imaging is used to differentiate between materials of different compositions. Phases heavier than carbon will look bright (meaning, impurities will luminesce), and pure carbon will look matte black, as seen here. The even coloration demonstrates the >96% C purity of the Santa Cruz graphite concentrate.

ABOUT DORFNER ANZAPLAN GmbH

Dorfner is a leading European specialty minerals producer delivering high-quality mineral products to different industries. ANZAPLAN was founded in 1985 to become the most independent venture within the Dorfner group of companies while concentrating the group's analytical and engineering know-how to serve external customers. Extensive know-how in specialty minerals processing, including liberation of fine-grained minerals, separation, flotation, and mechanical, chemical, and thermal modification derived from more than a century of day-to-day processing experience at Dorfner, has been successfully applied in the processing of various graphite raw materials. Furthermore, ANZAPLAN has detailed expertise in advanced chemical and thermal purification, upgrading graphite concentrates to >99.9% purity levels. Today ANZAPLAN is a specialist with a strong focus on specialty minerals and metals businesses (e.g. graphite, lithium minerals, rare-earth elements, high purity quartz), providing a one-stop-shop solution across all phases of the economic evaluation and process development -- with technological expertise from its laboratories, test-center and pilot-plant processing facilities including basic and advanced engineering services.