An exciting milestone for the Toowong Process™ and the team behind its development.
Fortescue has announced the sale of more than 40 tonnes of copper concentrate treated using the Toowong Process™ technology, demonstrating its potential to turn high-arsenic copper concentrate into a clean marketable product.
Developed by Core Resources Pty Ltd and acquired by Fortescue in 2022, the Toowong Process™ uses a patented hydrometallurgical flowsheet to selectively remove arsenic from copper concentrates while retaining the copper. This milestone follows four years of development and testing of the process through a fully integrated and continuous demonstration plant at Core’s facilities in Brisbane. The demonstration plant included seven testing campaigns operating over more than 3000 hours. The process reduced arsenic levels to below 0.3 per cent while retaining more than 99.9 per cent of the copper. The first commercial sale involved more than 40 tonnes of treated concentrate with less than 0.25 per cent arsenic, down from feedstocks containing up to 7 per cent arsenic.
For Core it is rewarding to see the technology developed through many years of research, metallurgical testwork and piloting progress towards commercial application, helping address a significant challenge for the global copper industry.
Congratulations to the Fortescue team and to Lachlan MacDonald, Di Liu, Jennifer Truong, Stephen Philpot, Eavan Wang, Peter Rohner and the significant involvement from the Core team over the years.
