Terrafame Sotkamo scandium recovery: process integration notes for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on International Mining – News
30 Second Briefing
Terrafame has started a prefeasibility study to recover scandium from process streams at its bioheap-leach nickel mine in Sotkamo, Finland, using the existing hydrometallurgical circuit as a base. If viable, the project would make Terrafame the only scandium producer in Europe, adding a critical rare earth element to its current battery-grade nickel output. For process engineers, the key questions will be scandium grades in intermediate liquors, additional solvent extraction or ion-exchange stages required, and integration without disrupting nickel and cobalt recovery.
Technical Brief
- Prefeasibility work will interrogate existing Sotkamo process streams for scandium deportment and mass balance.
- Study scope focuses on integrating scandium recovery into Terrafame’s current hydrometallurgical flowsheet at Sotkamo.
- Terrafame’s existing battery-grade nickel production provides an established impurity management and SX/precipitation baseline.
- Co-location of scandium recovery with nickel production reduces greenfield infrastructure, permitting and tailings footprint.
- Being Europe’s only scandium producer would position Sotkamo as a regional supply hub for REE alloys.
- For similar brownfield mining sites, scandium-by-product studies hinge on trace-element analytics in intermediate liquors.
Our Take
Scandium and other rare earth element pieces are still a small subset of our 1185 Mining stories, so Terrafame’s work at Sotkamo sits in a relatively niche but strategically important space compared with the more common copper, nickel and zinc coverage.
Finland’s positioning within Europe as a nickel producer, echoed in our coverage of Boliden’s European nickel operations, suggests that adding scandium recovery at Sotkamo could strengthen the region’s role as a supplier of critical metals to EU industrial and defence supply chains.
For a nickel operation like Terrafame’s mine in Sotkamo, recovering scandium from existing ore streams is likely to be evaluated as a low‑incremental‑capex, by‑product strategy, which can improve project sustainability metrics by increasing metal yield per tonne mined.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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