At the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada convention in Toronto, Tyler Muir of Homerun Resources Inc. (TSXV: HMR | OTCQB: HMRFF) said the company is nearing completion of a bankable feasibility study for what it describes as Latin America’s first solar glass manufacturing facility.
“It’s exciting to be here. It’s refreshing to see all the people out and walking around the floor,” Muir said during an interview with InvestorNews.com host Tracy Hughes on the opening day of PDAC.
Homerun is developing a vertically integrated clean energy materials platform anchored by a high-purity, low-iron silica resource in Bahia, Brazil.
“We’re working diligently to complete a bankable feasibility study on Latin America’s first solar glass manufacturing facility,” Muir said. “That’s a very important milestone for us because it gives people something concrete they can look at and model from. After that, you can move into financing and construction.”
The project originated with the discovery of a high-purity silica deposit suitable for solar glass manufacturing.
“We found this high-purity silica sand resource in Brazil, and through metallurgical studies we realized that this silica deposit is perfectly suitable for very high-efficiency solar glass,” Muir said.
“We have next to no iron and next to no aluminum attached to our silica sand.”
Brazil currently imports nearly all of its solar glass. “So we said, why don’t we bring the industry to Brazil?” he said.
The company has also secured offtake agreements tied to the planned facility. “We’ve announced offtake agreements that exceed our annual capacity,” Muir said, noting that Brazilian solar module manufacturer Sengi Solar increased its offtake commitment to a minimum of 100,000 tonnes annually.
Homerun recently completed its district control strategy in the Santa Maria Eterna silica sand district in Bahia, including a purchase agreement covering 582 hectares of land.
“Fast forward to where we are now: we have full control over the entire district, and we have a plot of land where we will be building the silica purification plant as well as the solar glass plant,” Muir said.
He added that the purity of the company’s silica may eliminate the need for antimony in the glass-making process.
“There’s a threshold you need to hit for iron contaminants to produce efficient solar glass, and that threshold is about 70 ppm,” Muir said. “In our raw form, our silica is under 10 ppm.”
“So we actually don’t need to use antimony,” he said. “By not using antimony in our solar glass, we cut about US$30 million in operating costs.”
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