Fulcrum Metals (AIM:FMET) said new laboratory testing at its Teck-Hughes tailings project in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, has extracted rubidium, strontium and scandium for the first time, taking the total number of metals recovered from the site to six.
The AIM and OTCQB-listed metals recovery company, which uses Extrakt Process Solutions' cyanide-free technology under licence to recover precious and critical metals from legacy mine tailings, said the non-optimised testing achieved 74.5% strontium extraction, 52.5% rubidium and 47.8% scandium, alongside gold, silver and tellurium recoveries already demonstrated at the site.
Precious-metal recoveries held up at a comparable grind size, with gold at 62.4%, silver at 85.4% and tellurium at 91.1%, broadly in line with earlier results at the same particle size.
Those figures remain below the company's optimised Phase 3 benchmarks of up to 78% gold, 95% silver and 96% tellurium, achieved at a finer grind, and Fulcrum said the new critical-mineral testing was not itself optimised.
The testing, carried out by TDI Solutions under Extrakt's supervision on the same Teck-Hughes composite used in earlier programmes, also returned strong extraction of copper, cobalt, nickel and manganese, metals not part of the critical-mineral target list but indicative of the technology's broader reach.
Zirconium, by contrast, was essentially not leached and would need a separate recovery route.
"These results represent a significant milestone for Fulcrum, demonstrating the potential to recover three additional critical minerals from the same Teck-Hughes material previously tested for gold, silver and tellurium", said chief executive Ryan Mee, adding that the company now has "a compelling opportunity to build on our earlier optimisation work and unlock additional value from a much broader metal basket."
William Florman, president of Extrakt Process Solutions, said the results "will inform the next stages of laboratory optimisation and pilot testing for Teck-Hughes", though he cautioned that further testing and analysis will be needed to determine commercial deployment potential.
Fulcrum is building a standalone pilot facility in Mississauga, Ontario, housed in a roughly 12,526 sq ft site leased by subsidiary Fulcrum EnviroTech on an initial six-year term from 1 October, funded in part by a £1m financing announced on 27 October.
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The company said the new critical-mineral results widen the pilot's purpose from principally precious-metal recovery to integrated precious and critical-metal optimisation, including investigation of flotation integration and downstream product recovery.
Fit-out and commissioning at Mississauga are now targeted for completion by the end of the first quarter of 2027, with Teck-Hughes piloting targeted for the second quarter of 2027, later than the end-2026 commissioning timeline previously set out for the facility.
Fulcrum said comparable critical-mineral grades have also been reported at its nearby Sylvanite gold tailings project, though this remains subject to its own metallurgical testing.
The company cautioned that the new figures represent preliminary extraction from solids rather than refined products, with solution balances, downstream recovery, processing costs and achievable selling prices still to be confirmed.
Successful pilot testing at Teck-Hughes also remains a condition of Fulcrum's non-binding term sheet with Chancery Royalty, under which Chancery would pay $20m for a 5% net smelter return royalty over future Teck-Hughes gold production, subject to due diligence and definitive documentation.