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    Terrafame Sotkamo scandium recovery: process integration notes for engineers

    May 19, 2026|

    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.

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    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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