
Mineral sands (bottom) exposed in the Fingerboards Precinct following a natural tree fall.
Project overview
Gippsland Critical Minerals’ project is located in the Fingerboards Precinct of East Gippsland in Victoria, approx. 270 kilometres east of Melbourne.
The Fingerboards Precinct contains important deposits of rare earth elements including Neodymium, Praseodymium, Dysprosium and Terbium, as well as Zircon, Ilmenite, and Rutile. GCM proposes to extract approximately 170 million tonnes of ore to produce approximately 8 million tonnes of heavy mineral concentrate (HMC) over the life of the project.
These rare earths and critical minerals are in high global demand for applications in renewable energy such as wind turbines and electric vehicles, and in communications technology, defence, medical science and transport.
The Fingerboards Project has been under development for over a decade and its development has been re-scoped to reduce and mitigate environmental impacts and include a stronger and better defined commitment to community consultation and benefit sharing.
How we mine
Accelerating rehabilitation of mined areas
The Fingerboards Project plans to extract minerals from the ground using a practice known as progressive mining.
This method involves mining in stages or strips of land, and progressively returning unused sands to the site by backfilling and rehabilitating the land. Of all the mineral sands that are excavated, the economic minerals account for about 5% of the volume. 95% of the sand is returned to site.
Modern mineral sands mining has advanced to significantly reduce impacts to the environment through progressive rehabilitation and minimising the extraction footprint at any one time. Improved processing also allows for greater water and energy efficiency and high levels of water recovery and reuse in the processing. These mining techniques allow the mining process to avoid large pits or open voids as is the case with coal mines in the Latrobe Valley.
