Curriculum Vitae
Rodrigo is a Senior Metallurgical Engineer and his main duties are to develop strategic and operational leadership of SGS MPS and Engineering services by providing process engineering, process plant audit, metallurgical accounting, plant optimization, trade-off studies, process plant debottlenecking and project management to clients in the mining and mineral processing industry.
Rodrigo has more than 36 years of experience in research & development of metallurgical processes, process plant design, plant construction, plant operations and project management in USA, Mexico, Peru, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, China, Mongolia and Philippines. Rodrigo has a number of published papers and articles.
Master of Science (Mineral Processing)
The University of Arizona, 1993
Tucson, Arizona
Certified Metallurgical Engineer
Central University of Venezuela, 1982, Caracas, Venezuela
B.S. Metallurgical Engineering
The University of Arizona, 1978
Tucson, Arizona
LICENSE: Registered Professional Metallurgical Engineer (PE), Venezuela College of Engineers, Registration #71096.
Registered Member, a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101. Society of Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration Inc. (SME). Englewood, Colorado.
A Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101, with special expertise in Metallurgy and Mineral Processing. Mining and Metallurgical Society of America.
Summary
Current technology for the recovery of lithium from underground chloride brines relies on evaporation to produce a concentrated solution suitable for lithium carbonate precipitation. The evaporation process takes up to 24 months to produce the concentrated brine and has a large environmental footprint (prohibitive in certain jurisdictions). An alternative that is receiving interest is recovery of lithium from the raw brine by solvent extraction (SX) so that the lithium is concentrated right away thus eliminating the evaporation footprint and reducing in-process inventory.
SGS Canada's Lakefield laboratories undertook an investigation of lithium solvent extraction from a chloride brine. The synergistic system used a commercially available beta-diketone reagent (Hallochem's Mextral 54-100) mixed with a liquid phosphine oxide (Solvay's Cyanex 923) in an aliphatic diluent. This work was carried out to expand on the results reported by workers from CSIRO in Australia using a beta-diketone reagent of similar chemical structure, but from a different commercial supplier, in a similar extractant mixture. The current report expands on some aspects of the data reported in the earlier study. Extraction with a more concentrated reagent mixture enabled higher lithium loading to be attained. The results of scrubbing and stripping tests are also reported
