Oct 3 2016
Orbite Technologies Inc. ("Orbite", or the "Company") today announced that, further to its press release of September 21, 2016, production activities have commenced at its high purity alumina ("HPA") plant.
- Commissioning and start-up of the digestion circuit was completed, as planned. The first batch of feedstock digestion commenced this afternoon and will be followed by another batch early tomorrow.
- Commissioning and start-up of the crystallisation circuit is well advanced and the first batches of liquor, produced in the digestion circuit, will be transferred to the crystallisation circuit over the weekend for first production of aluminum chloride hexahydrate ("ACH"). crystals. ACH crystals are the precursor to high purity alumina ("HPA").
- Production will continue in batch mode in these two circuits as extensive testing will be carried out on the digester liquors and ACH crystals, to ensure production and purity criteria are met. Each full digestion and crystallisation batch cycle will initially take approximately 3.5 days to complete.
- Once the ACH crystals meet the purity criteria, they will be transferred to the decomposer and calciner circuit for HPA production.
- Once production and purity criteria are met in all three circuits, the plant will switch over to semi-continuous operation mode and commence ramp up to name plate capacity.
"We are very pleased to have now commenced the production sequence at our HPA plant," stated Glenn Kelly, CEO of Orbite. "We are entering a very exciting phase in our evolution as a company, and we would like to thank our employees and contractors for their sustained and concentrated efforts over the last months."
About Orbite
Orbite Technologies Inc. is a Canadian cleantech company whose innovative and proprietary processes are expected to produce alumina and other high-value products, such as rare earth and rare metal oxides, at one of the lowest costs in the industry, and in a sustainable fashion, using feedstocks that include aluminous clay, kaolin, nepheline, bauxite, red mud, fly ash as well as serpentine residues from chrysotile processing sites. Orbite is currently in the process of finalizing its first commercial high-purity alumina (HPA) production plant in Cap-Chat, Québec and has completed the basic engineering for a proposed smelter-grade alumina (SGA) production plant, which would use clay mined from its Grande-Vallée deposit. The Company's portfolio contains 16 intellectual property families, including 37 patents and 91 pending patent applications in 11 different countries and regions. The first intellectual property family is patented in Canada, USA, Australia, China, Japan and Russia. The Company also operates a state of the art technology development center in Laval, Québec, where its technologies are developed and validated.