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Alliance formed to develop mine-to-market manganese-based batteries

5th December 2014

By: Henry Lazenby

Creamer Media Deputy Editor: North America

  

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TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based Star Minerals Group has joined forces with Cooperative Mineral Resources (CMR) of Brainerd, in Minnesota, and Octopus Technologies (OTI) of Vancouver, in British Columbia, to develop a mine-to-market manganese-based battery technology.

Star is a junior mining company, focused on finding, exploring and developing strategic metal deposits for the battery industry, as well as other critical materials products for downstream applications in the green-energy sector.

CMR is owned by Crow Wing Power (CWP), which is a member-owned electric utility, with the cooperative distributing electricity to 37 000 customers in the Cass, Crow Wing and Morrison counties, in rural Minnesota.

In 2009, CWP, through CMR, started work to advance the Emily manganese/iron-ore project, located near Emily, Minnesota, on the Cuyuna Iron Range. The ultimate goal of the project was to develop a natural resource for the benefit of the local economy, the members of CWP and Minnesota and to supply electrolytic manganese metal (EMM) to the steel industry and electrolytic manganese dioxide (EMD) to the battery industry.

CMR had undertaken extensive work including exploration core drilling, bulk sampling at Emily and mineralogical and metallurgical testing at recognised analytical laboratories, and had been successful in producing EMM and EMD from samples taken at Emily. In May 2013, Barr Engineering of Minneapolis, Minnesota, completed a technical report that compiled the available historic data and modern data from the CMR work to produce an historic estimate of manganese mineralisation at the Emily deposit.

Based on the report, the deposit ranged from 1.4-billion pounds of contained manganese, grading at 16.48% at a cutoff grade of 10% manganese, to 2.2-billion pounds of contained manganese, grading at 9.2% at a cutoff grade of 1%.

The third partner, energy storage company OTI, had developed a smaller, lighter, green battery that significantly reduced the cost of energy storage and would be ideally suited for backup/standby power applications and smart grid management systems.

OTI was currently in a strategic partnership with Kemetco Research in building the prototype battery for testing and certification. Kemetco, also a specialist in extractive metallurgy and chemical processing, had done extensive work for CMR on manganese metallurgy.

Star and CMR said they intended to enter into a joint venture (JV) by February to develop the Emily project. Should the technical and economic viability of the Emily project be established, the partners would develop the project. The initial focus would be to produce EMD to be sold to OTI in an offtake agreement between OTI and the CMR/Star JV under terms yet to be established.

OTI had, in turn, completed and signed a sales distribution agreement for its storage battery with a significant global player in this market.

Final documentation was yet to be finalised and was subject to due diligence by all parties, final terms between Kemetco and OTI on completing the test facility for their battery plant and final terms between Kemetco and the JV to build the test facility to produce EMD.

Edited by Tracy Hancock
Creamer Media Contributing Editor

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