High Purity Quartz Project

The High Purity Quartz market is considered highly specialised with a low tonnage, high value market. HPQ as commodity can be used for:

• furnace feed to produce ferro-silicon
• furnace feed to produce metallurgical grade silicon
• semi-conductors
• solar grade silicon
• specialist technology applications
• crucibles

Lump quartz is used as feedstock for ferro silicon and silicon metal furnaces. The quartz is fed into a furnace using charcoal, coal or woodchip as the source of carbon. About 55% of global metallurgical grade silicon consumption is used in aluminium silicon alloys also known as silumin alloys for aluminium parts cast used principally in the automotive industry. The silicon greatly improves the hardness and wear and tear of aluminium parts.

Metallurgical grade silicon can be further upgraded to solar grade and electronic grade silicon via the siemens process in a polysilicon plant.

We are exploring a number of HPQ prospects with rock chip sample results between 99.5% and 99.8% SiO2.