Vara Mada (formerly known as the Toliara Project) is in south-west Madagascar, 45km north of the regional town and port of Toliara.
Vara Mada is underpinned by the large, high grade, ilmenite, zircon and monazite rich, Ranobe deposit, and is considered to be one of the best mineral sands development projects in the world.
The project is well advanced with mining license and environmental approvals in place and is currently progressing towards development.
The Ranobe deposit contains a high-grade Mineral Resource of 2,580Mt at 4.3% heavy mineral (HM), with Ore Reserves of 904Mt at 6.1% HM, sufficient to support a 38 year mine life.
The deposit benefits from low slimes, free running sands, and no overburden, which should enable a simple mining and tailings methodology. Mining will use conventional dozer trap mining units.
Ore will be received at the wet concentrator plant from the mining units via a slurry pipeline. The wet concentrator plant will remove slimes and concentrate the valuable heavy minerals with a number of gravity separation steps and reject most of the non-valuable, lighter minerals.
The heavy mineral concentrate will then be processed in the mineral separation plant. The mineral separation plant will clean and separate the rutile, ilmenite, and zircon minerals into finished products, as well as produce a concentrated monazite waste stream.
The monazite waste stream will then be pumped to the monazite concentrator plant for further processing through gravity and magnetic separation to produced a finished monazite product rich in rare earth elements.
The products will then be transported to a purpose-built export facility for shipping to customers.
The feasibility study for Vara Mada is available here.