Update on the Phalaborwa project in South Africa

• Piloting campaign has confirmed Rainbow’s innovative process, paving the way for the first commercial recovery of rare earths from phosphogypsum.
• Primary front-end leach plant flowsheet to produce a high grade rare earth feed stream has been subject to extensive testwork and piloting, delivering an optimised and simplified process flowsheet with a smaller footprint, with expected Capex and Opex efficiencies.
• Successful delivery of neodymium and praseodymium (together “Nd/Pr”) of ca. 96% purity so far in the back-end separation pilot plant; this is confirmed by market participants as a saleable product at a normal market impurity discount. Rainbow team continues to optimise the process to achieve the expected oxide purity of +99%.
• The ongoing separation work places the timing to deliver the Definitive Feasibility Study (“DFS”) in H1 2025 at risk, recognising that the most important objective is to deliver the optimal flowsheet for the project’s long-term success; guidance for DFS completion is updated to full year 2025.
• Offtake discussions have commenced with organisations looking to secure a strategic and ethical source of the rare earths critical to the green energy transition.
• Longer-term, the honing of this technology will allow Rainbow to access a much larger addressable market in order to develop a long-term, scalable and sustainable business.
• Further technical information on the flowsheet testwork and optimisations is available at https://www.rainbowrareearths.com/project/phalaborwa/ as well as in an updated presentation which is available at https://www.rainbowrareearths.com/investors/results-reports-presentations/.

News in full

We caught up with CEO George Bennett at  the Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town. He provided an update on Rainbow’s operations, but also tells about the many uses of rare earths and why they are so important in the global energy transition