Molycorp officials have announced that their chloralkali plant at Mountain Pass, California, is complete and that full-scale commissioning operations have commenced.
The plant will recycle wastewater and produce hydrochloric acid and caustic soda in the rare earth separations process. Company officials said once fully operational and optimized, the plant will achieve cash production cost targets, making Molycorp globally competitive.
“These are the last major construction activities of the re-build of Mountain Pass,” said Molycorp CEO Constantine Karayannopoulos, “and we expect these units to be commissioned and enter into production in Q4 2013.”
The final unit of the Mountain Pass multistage cracking plant, meanwhile, is now mechanically complete; the unit is in a multistage process to increase current rare earth recovery rates. These will heighten production throughput while contributing to lower production costs.
