Elementos Limited announced pilot scale metallurgical test work program has successfully confirmed ore from its flagship Oropesa Project in Spain can be processed via a conventional tin flow sheet to produce a high-grade and commercially desirable tin concentrate. Testing at Wardell Armstrong International's (WAI) laboratory in Cornwall, UK used a large representative bulk sample sourced from the Oropesa Tin Project in Andalucía, Spain. Metallurgical upgrade results from the pilot plant have confirmed the project's Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) flow sheet, which will now be further matured with process engineering contractor Duro Felguera, which was recently awarded the ECI Mineral Process Plant Contract.

The flow sheet encompasses crushing and grinding, sulphide flotation, a gravity tin recovery circuit, tin flotation recovery circuits and magnetic separation. The pilot plant test work program has confirmed robust average metallurgical upgrade factors. Elementos confirms production of a commercially appealing >61% tin concentrate with low impurity specifications.

The company, as previously detailed, is engaged with a number of tin smelters and traders and will further progress commercial offtake discussions based on achieving these grades on a pilot-scale basis. Metallurgical upgrade factors are based on a representative bulk sample which has been confirmed as representative of the ore for the project on the following criteria: spatial distribution, ore domain, average-grade, weathering and geology. Summarized as follows: Spatial locations of the individual samples used in the bulk sample provide sufficient coverage of the potential open pit; Proportions of the weathering types used in the bulk sample are generally representative of the proportions of the total mineable resource; Samples are considered representative of a range of mineralized domains with the number of samples coming from the mineralized domains (by tonnage); and Average grade of the bulk sample (0.46% Sn) is consistent with the estimated average deposit grade being fed into the plant.

In addition to the summarized overall metallurgical upgrade and flowsheet information, test work has again confirmed, via mineralogy tests, that Oropesa tin ore is hosted in cassiterite (>99%) mineralization, with only the minor quantities of tin (<1%) hosted in stannite. Cassiterite is the `economic' form of tin mineralization, with stannite being a difficult tin mineral to recover. This aligns with and confirms the findings from previous mineralogy test work on the deposit.