Sedgman has been awarded the Front-End Engineering and Design (FEED) contract for the lithium concentrator plant at Savannah Resources’ Barroso lithium project in Portugal.
The contract builds on Sedgman’s previous involvement with the project, including development of the project’s process flowsheet development and plant design for the delivery of the Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS).
Under the FEED scope, Sedgman will review and optimise the DFS process design and progress engineering documentation to tender status, encompassing key processing areas including crushing, milling, dense media separation, flotation, dewatering, water systems and associated plant infrastructure.
Sedgman Managing Director, Grant Fraser, said: “We are pleased to continue supporting Savannah Resources on the advancement of the Barroso lithium project. This award reflects Sedgman’s proven technical capability in the design and delivery of lithium processing facilities, our extensive experience across critical minerals projects and the value-driven solution developed by our team. Building on our previous involvement with the project, we are well positioned to optimise the concentrator design and support Barroso’s progression towards development.”
The Barroso lithium project has been recognised as a Strategic Project by the European Commission under the Critical Raw Materials Act and is expected to play an important role in supporting Europe’s growing demand for battery materials.
Earlier this year, Savannah Resources published the DFS for Phase 1 of Barroso, together with its first maiden JORC reserve. The results cover the first 14 years of production, and, it says, confirm the project’s exceptionally strong financial and technical merits. The Phase 1 operation will see 2.56 Mt of spodumene concentrate (183,000 t/y), based on a 20 Mt first probable reserve.
The DFS has some interesting insights into the mining plan from a method and fleet point of view. Mining will be executed as a conventional open pit excavator-truck operation. Loading equipment will be comprised of 130 t nominal operating weight (or similar) backhoes and 90 t nominal payload (or similar) mining dump trucks.
Mining bench height will be 5 m across all deposits, with ore areas mined in two flitches of 2.5 m each with the option of performing full 5 m double-benching mining in waste only areas. Ore mining will be reached at early stages due to the shallow mineralisation characteristic across the project’s deposits.
Ore will be hauled on internal private haul roads to the ROM yard and waste to the various waste dumps located near to each respective pit. As a commitment to both early rehabilitation and operational efficiency, backfilling is also included in the mining sequence, starting with Pinheiro pit once it is fully depleted, which mitigates any impact caused by an open empty pit left for an extended period of time.
Mining will be executed by an external contractor under a rates based contract, which may also include production drilling, blast hole explosive charging, tie-in and shot blasting. Savannah will have its own technical services team and mine management team, therefore the production geology, mine planning, drill & blast engineering, blast hole sampling, surveying and contractor supervision functions will be fully controlled by the project owner, providing full direction and oversight on execution.
Drilling, blast hole charging, tie-in and shot blasting will be executed via an external contractor, with these functions likely to be included within the mining contract scope.
Mining will start with pre-stripping activities during the year prior to the start of processing operations, i.e. still during construction. This will provide waste to complete construction of key infrastructure, such as water reservoirs, the TSF buttress and roads.
The first pits to be started will be Pinheiro and Grandão, followed by NOA in year 5 after depletion of Pinheiro. Reservatório starts in year 7 once NOA is depleted, with Aldeia being the last pit, starting in year 9. Reservatório, Grandão and Aldeia pits will run in parallel between years 9 to 12 when Grandão is depleted, with Reservatório and Aldeia then continuing until the end of the mine life in year 14.
Annual material movement varies throughout the mine life, peaking at 17.4 Mt in year 15, although this movement corresponds to waste backfilled from the waste dumps into the pits for rehabilitation and closure purposes. Pit mining movements peak at 11.4 Mt in year 11. Ore feed is maintained at 1.5 Mt per annum, with the exception of years 1 and 14 of operations which correspond to ramp up and ramp down periods.
The finalised process flowsheet is designed to manage variability in lithium grade, mica content, iron-bearing minerals, slimes generation and ore texture. The flowsheet includes crushing and screening, DMS pre-concentration, grinding, desliming, magnetic separation, mica flotation, spodumene flotation and dewatering. The process produces spodumene concentrate and four tails or by-product streams: DMS floats, combined process tails from fines and magnetics, mica concentrate and spodumene flotation by-product.
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