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Considered a critical mineral by countries including the United States, Canada, the European Union and Australia, scandium is a rare, versatile and useful metal.
Scandium is one of the most effective elements able to strengthen aluminium, while also offering improved flexibility, and resistance to heat and corrosion. It is used to produce high-performance aluminium alloys for applications that need to be light, strong and heat resistant, including in aerospace, automotive, heat exchangers, sporting goods, 3D printing and energy transmission applications. Scandium oxide is used to improve the performance of solid oxide fuel cells used as a green power source for buildings, medical facilities and data processing centres, as well as in niche products such as lasers and lighting.
Although it’s available all over the world, scandium is usually only found naturally in very small amounts, and is usually mixed up with other minerals and metals. So it can be hard to find, extract and process.
We’ve developed a new way to sustainably extract and produce high-purity scandium oxide from the waste streams of titanium dioxide production at our RTIT Quebec Operations, without the need for any additional mining. In May 2022, we produced the first batch of this high-purity scandium oxide at our commercial-scale demonstration plant in Sorel-Tracy, Canada, making us the first and only North American producer of this critical mineral.
The Burra™ project located in New South Wales, Australia, offers a long life, high-grade scandium oxide resource that has the potential to become a primary scandium operation in Australia.
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