Surefire Resources has announced the appointment of an international consulting firm to assist with the completion of the Mining Prefeasibility Study (PFS) for the company’s Victory Bore Vanadium project, located 400km from Geraldton Port in Western Australia.
Snowden Optiro, a tier-one international geological and mining consulting group with over 35 years of Australian and international experience in the mineral resources sector, was appointed to the task.
Snowden Optiro brings a wealth of experience to the Victory Bore development team and will provide the key input parameters for completion of the PFS which is being managed by metallurgical group, METS Engineers.
Snowden Optiro’s inclusion in the Victory Bore development will assist the company in the future with investors, financiers, governments, and regulators.
Snowden Optiro will specifically provide the following:
- Mine plan:
- Model preparation
- Equipment selection
- Pit optimisation and design
- Waste dump design
- Mine layout design
- Life-of-mine (LOM) mining schedule
- Haulage estimates
- Mining cost estimation:
- Mining cost estimation for a contractor mining scenario
- Pricing schedule development and cost model
- Documentation:
- On completion, Snowden Optiro will produce a mining report that can feed into the overall PFS report
This appointment follows Surefire Resources’s recent execution of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) for downstream processing of magnetite concentrate from Victory Bore.
The MoU provides the company with a clear pathway for maximising value from the Victory Bore project with a development strategy for a low-cost mine and beneficiation operation at the Victory Bore site, where high-grade vanadium concentrate is produced for transport to Geraldton Port, and then on-shipping to Port Damam, KSA.
Downstream processing of the concentrate would then occur in nearby industrial sectors to produce high value end products of vanadium pentoxide (V₂O₅), vanadium electrolyte (VE), ferro-vanadium (FeV), and bi-products of pig-iron, ferro-titanium and also potential for the company’s high purity alumina 4N (99.99 per cent).
Surefire Resources’s Managing Director, Paul Burton, said, “The appointment of Snowden Optiro brings another quality global brand to our team as we progress development of the world class Victory Bore deposit, and enter discussions with various government and private organisations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
