The largest nickel deposit in the US, which contains roughly 9.38 billion pounds of the metal, is currently undergoing new extraction tests aimed at recovering seven critical minerals.
The project involves mineral exploration and development firm Alaska Energy Metals Corporation (AEMC) and Canada’s critical mineral refining company RecycLiCo Battery Materials. Teams have reportedly begun testing concentrate samples from the Eureka deposit at the Nikolai Nickel Project.
According to reports, the deposit is the largest known nickel resource in the US. But it also contains cobalt, copper, chromium, platinum, palladium, and gold, alongside iron. The tests will assess whether RecycLiCo’s proprietary hydrometallurgical technology can recover valuable metals from the deposit’s nickel-copper concentrates.
The tests could eventually lead to better metal refining methods and strengthen US supplies of critical minerals. “We are pleased to be assisting AEMC with this important phase of their Nikolai Project,” Richard Sadowsky, RecycLiCo’s interim CEO, pointed out.
New recovery technology
The testing is taking place at RecycLiCo’s lab in the city of Delta, British Columbia. The samples were collected during drilling campaigns in both 2023 and 2024. This work follows an earlier agreement between AEMC and RecycLiCo’s US subsidiary.
Under the agreement, the firms are exploring how hydrometallurgical processing could be used to refine concentrates from the Eureka deposit. The method relies on liquid-based chemical reactions to separate and extract metals from mineral concentrates and other materials.
The latest efforts will determine whether the technology can process the deposit’s complex mixture of minerals. AEMC previously reported high metal recovery rates from flotation trials that produced a nickel-copper concentrate.
The Eureka deposit is part of AEMC’s Nikolai Nickel Project, which is set in Interior Alaska near Delta Junction. The project spans 10,683 hectares (about 26,400 acres) and is added to the US government’s FAST-41 Transparency Dashboard to improve oversight of federal permitting reviews.
Securing US critical minerals
The company aims to transform the Nikolai Nickel Project into a major US source of strategic metals, as its mineral resources have applications in electric vehicles, batteries, and industrial manufacturing, among other technologies.
“We expect to demonstrate the benefits of using our hydrometallurgical solutions in the recovery of high-value materials essential to the establishment of a wholly domestic critical mineral supply chain, and we look forward to our continuing collaboration as the project moves forward,” Sadowsky shared in a press release.
The collaboration between the two companies also forms part of a broader effort to strengthen the US automotive supply chains. Meanwhile, AEMC recently joined Minerals for National Automotive Competitiveness (MINAC), a group that brings together mineral suppliers, metal refiners, and car manufacturers.
The team includes RecycLiCo, electric vehicle manufacturer Lucid, as well as other industry participants. Gregory Beischer, AEMC CEO and president, welcomed the latest testing initiative.
“AEMC was honored to enter this collaborative group which includes RecycLiCo, Lucid and others,” he disclosed. “It is great to see tangible collaboration in action, and we are excited to see how the RecycLiCo process works on recovering the various metals from concentrates we have produced from the Eureka deposit.”