The rise of Andromeda Metals has raised eyebrows in 2021, as its Great White halloysite-kaolin mine in South Australia has progressed from a mining application to an offtake agreement worth more than $49 million per year.
In February, the junior miner lodged its mining application with the South Australian Department for Energy and Mining, following extensive pre-feasibility studies, and should receive a result later in the year.
In the meantime, Andromeda has progressed with drilling programs, off-take agreements and even a research program with the University of Newcastle.
The research program will look into the use of rare halloysite nanotubes for carbon capture technology, which can be found at the Great White project.
The nanotubes can take millions of years to form and can be very expensive to create synthetically.
For this reason, Andromeda’s 20 million-tonne total resource on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula has been valued at $700 per tonne by a pre-feasibility study.
More recently, however, an off-take agreement for the Great Project was signed with Jiangsu Mineral Sources International Trading for 70,000 tonnes per annum, for an initial five-year term.
The agreement priced the product above the $700 per tonne figure, according to Andromeda’s statement in June, but an exact figure was not released.
Kaolin has hundreds of applications in everyday life, including ceramics, paint, paper and even a few kilograms in each car on our roads.
Upon receiving approval to mine the resource, Andromeda expects to commence operations in February 2022.