Surefire Resources appoints experienced CEO to drive Victory Bore plans
Surefire Resources (ASX:SRN) has appointed highly-regarded mine development and finance specialist Jan De Jager as chief executive officer to help drive the commercialisation of its Australian vanadium developments.
The experienced mining executive brings more than a quarter of a century of success in operational, finance, commercial, strategy and business development roles to his new role.
He has held senior leadership roles at AVZ Minerals (ASX: AVZ), Covalent Lithium, Roy Hill and Xstrata Nickel in Australia, while his background also includes a period at Sasol Mining in South Africa where he was responsible for private equity deals and business restructuring.
‘Valuable addition’
“The board and I are delighted with the appointment of Mr De Jager and consider him to be a valuable addition to the Surefire team,” Surefire executive chair Vladimir Nikolaenko said.
“Mr De Jager’s extensive experience in various greenfield and brownfield projects will be a good fit for the company’s current development and marketing of its Victory Bore magnesium project in Western Australia and its unique vanadium recovery solution.”
“He will greatly assist in aggressively progressing and advancing the company’s key vanadium projects at Victory Bore and Unaly Hill, Perenjori iron ore, its Yidby gold discovery and Kooline silver-lead project.”
Critical metal
Mr De Jager said vanadium’s growing value as a critical metal makes the role at Surefire particularly attractive.
“It is a privilege to be entrusted to lead Surefire as its next chief executive officer and I look forward to the opportunity of driving the progression of Surefire to its full value and the realisation of a substantial increase in value to its stakeholders from all of the company’s projects.”
Recovery solution
In early May, Surefire lodged a provisional patent application with IP Australia covering its unique vanadium recovery solution.
The process is a significant improvement over existing vanadium recovery processes, with test work achieving high recoveries of vanadium and titanium along with high recoveries of base metals from titaniferous feedstocks from the Victory Bore project.
Earlier this year, Surefire unveiled promising laboratory-scale leach test work results that achieved 91% extraction for vanadium and 88% for titanium after a 96-hour leach directly from Victory Bore magnetite concentrate.
The leach process was applied to pre-treated concentrate allowing the leach process to scavenge effectively.
Further work improved the results to a 97% recovery of vanadium after only 24 hours.