Market For Coast Ilmenite Predicted

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30827, 12 August 1965, Page 1

Market For Coast Ilmenite Predicted

Australian chemists are developing a technique which may make the ilmenite deposits on West Coast beaches of considerable value as an export earner for New Zealand.

Mr I. E. Newnham, chief of the Division of Mineral Chemistry of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial irganisation, Melbourne, said in Christchurch yesterday that the process being developed in his laboratory would extract the iron and leave material from which

titanium oxide could be obtained. Ilmenite now sold for £3 a ton, and if it could be refined it would be worth £3O a ton.

“There must be a market for New Zealand ilmenite — especially in the United States,” Mr Newnham said. A product not unlike the New Zealand ilmenite was being successfully treated in Canada to produce titanium oxide for the steel industry. He would not say whether his chemists had yet perfected the technique for refining ilmenite. Another mineral, rutile, was also found on Australian beaches, along with zircon and ilmenite, which was of a higher grade than New Zealand ilmenite, Mr Newnham said. Rutile was very much in demand for the production of titanium, and he believed it might price itself off the market. There would then be a larger market for ilmenite.

He said that Australia was earning nearly £AlOm a year by exporting heavy mineral beach sands to Europe and the United States. So far there was no market for the products in Australia, and his laboratory was trying to develop uses for those chemicals.

Mr Newnham is to be the overseas lecturer at the annual conference of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry in Dunedin next week. His topic will be “Mineral Chemistry—a Lost Art or a Neglected Science?”