Mount Ridley Mines Limited

Most explorers have one story: a deposit. Mount Ridley has two. The first is Grass Patch, near Esperance in WA, home to the world's largest publicly reported JORC scandium resource, with heavy rare earths and gallium sitting in the same shallow clay.

The second is Selectro™, a leach process MRD owns outright and has now filed two patent applications on. In bench tests on Grass Patch ore it recovered 91.8% of the scandium at atmospheric pressure, using half the reagent of earlier tests. Most listed scandium developers rely on high-pressure acid leaching in autoclaves at around 250°C.

Then in October it worked on someone else's rock. On Darling Range bauxite supplied by ASX-listed Australian Silica Quartz, Selectro pulled out 92% of the aluminium, 97% of the iron and 95% of the gallium in a single leach below 100°C, leaving sand-like residue instead of red mud.

Why it matters now: China produces about 99% of the world's primary gallium, and its suspension of a gallium export ban to the US runs out on 27 November 2026. Scandium is on the same watch list. In August the US Department of War committed a conditional US$400m loan to Sunrise Energy Metals' scandium project. MRD is offering a non-China route to both metals, at a market cap of around $50m.

These are lab results. Separation into saleable products, bulk testing and economics are still to come.

Mount Ridley Mines (ASX: MRD, OTC: MRDMF) is a Perth-based critical minerals company with two engines: a giant multi-metal deposit, and a processing technology it owns 100%.

The deposit is the Grass Patch Complex, 25km from the Port of Esperance with road and power nearby. Scandium, heavy rare earths and gallium are each defined as separate JORC resources, stacked in the same near-surface clay. The company also holds the Weld Range West project in WA's Mid West.

The technology is Selectro™, a closed-loop leach that recycles its own reagent. It was built for Grass Patch's tricky high-silica clays and is now being tested on third-party ores. MRD's options are to use it at Grass Patch, license it to others, or both.

Next up is a Selectro demonstration plant in Perth, designed to run bulk batches and produce samples for potential buyers and partners. MRD says it is funded to keep that work moving.