Modern Mining July 2023

plant – targets production in three years

hydrometallurgical processing plants, is a game changer for the emerging battery metals developer. “In April, the Botswana Department of Mines approved the shipment of 100 t of K.Hill manga nese oxide material to the demo plant site – this will provide representative feedstock for the HPMSM for qualification by potential off-takers. The 100 t subsample was selected from over 200 t of mate rial collected from three outcrops around the K.Hill resource, with the sub-sample crushed and packed into one-tonne bags and delivered to the demo plant. The plant will demonstrate how the company’s low carbon process can adapt to the variability of K.Hill material and produce consistent battery-grade HPMSM. The successful delivery of samples of our low carbon HPMSM to off-takers will cement our position as an early mover in the battery-grade man ganese market.” The demo plant plays a pivotal role as it will help test the team’s project management and cost man agement skills and offer an opportunity as a training facility to upskill its workforce. It remains on track to produce HPMSM samples for testing by potential offtakers in late 2023. “Giyani has an early-mover advantage to meet the growing demand for HPMSM from the EV sector, which is prioritising responsible, low-carbon produc ers outside of the dominant Chinese supply chain. Our hydrometallurgical process, which treats our captive ore without the need for power-intensive cal cining or electrorefining, saves both cost and carbon emissions,” says Keating. 

In March, Giyani’s wholly owned subsidiary, Menzi Battery Metals, submitted its Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to the Department of Environmental Affairs for Botswana (DEA) as part of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process. Once awarded, the EIA will enable the company to apply for a 25-year Mining Licence for K.Hill. Further to this, Giyani Metals has been con structing a massive HPMSM demonstration plant in Johannesburg, which has been designed to validate the process flowsheet, de-risk commercial develop ment of K.Hill, and facilitate off-take contracts with customers. Discussing the technology, Keating explains that parts of it have been adopted in different leaching applications. “We are creating a new way of extracting manga nese, using existing, well understood technologies in a novel way to produce material for the battery sector. The technology effectively leaches differ ent materials, eliminating the impurities, to end up with high purity manganese that meets the stringent specifications of our potential EV customers. “To date, we have done a large amount of testing on the process at a laboratory scale and demonstrated it works. We are now in the process of constructing our large-scale demonstration plant (100 m in length), which will be used to validate the technology on a big scale and allow us to pro duce material for our customers to progress offtake discussions.” “We are making strong progress; recently the fabrication of the crystallisation unit, which is over 15 m tall and a key component of the plant, was com pleted and is awaiting transportation to the demo plant site.” The $10 million demonstration plant is being built on the West Rand in Johannesburg by MET63, a South African engineering firm focused on the development of mineral beneficiation and

Above: Demonstration plant crystallisers.

Left: Excavation of sample feedstock material for K.Hill Demo Plant.

Botswana – attractive mining jurisdiction  Botswana cemented its status in the Fraser Institute’s latest annual survey of mining companies, which is heavily focused on exploration.  Under the category “most attractive jurisdictions for mining investment”, Botswana ranked 10th out of 62 and was No 1 in Africa.

July 2023  MODERN MINING  21