Geomega Resources Inc. announced the continuation of hydrometallurgical test work on its Montviel rare earths deposit. The work will be done by Innord, the 100% owned subsidiary of Geomega, with a $400,000 funding contribution from the Ministère de l'Énergie et des Ressources Naturelles (“MERN”) of Quebec. To complement the working budget for this project, Geomega closed a non-brokered private placement (the “Offering”) of 1,408,055 units (the “Units”), at a price of $0.27 per Unit, for aggregate gross proceeds in the amount of $380,175 with Quebec based institutional investors and insiders of the Corporation.

This will allow the Corporation to have a dedicated budget for this project, independent of the budget allocated for the construction of the rare earth magnets recycling plant in St-Bruno, which is progressing towards equipment ordering, and other R&D projects. The project will be conducted under the “Program to support the exploration of critical and strategic minerals in Quebec” offered by the MERN. The 12 to 24-months project has a budget of $865,324 out of which the government grant program will contribute $400,000 of non-dilutive funding to the Corporation.

The objective of the project is to improve on the technology that was developed and patented in 2015 by incorporating the knowledge and experience gained from developing the rare earth recycling project and the bauxite residues project since then. The main technical objectives to be investigated in this project are: Eliminating the flotation circuit; Valorization of the iron by-product; Recycling of the main leaching reagents. The successful implementation of these objectives would simplify the process of extracting rare earths and niobium and could significantly reduce its operating costs.

The economic benefits of this project include: Cost reduction of the chemical reagents; Energy savings by avoiding very fine grinding that is required for flotation, solid heat recovery and other adjustments; Improving total REE recovery through whole ore leaching; Reduction of mining waste and tailings management costs; Increase of potential revenues through various by-products. Furthermore, the social and environmental impacts of the project are similarly important and will help obtain the required permits in the future and support of the local communities and the Waswanipi CREE First Nation. The environmental benefits of this project include: Reduction of water consumption; Reduction of liquid effluents; Reduction of solid mining waste volumes; Reduction of overall energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions for REE production compared to previous flowsheet; Further evaluation of the possibility of paste-backfill.

The results of the project will be used to complete a Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) on the Montviel deposit.