The Strange Lake deposit is part of a post-tectonic, peralkaline granite complex which has intruded along the contact between older gneisses and monzonites of the Churchill Province of the Canadian Shield.

The granite complex is sub-circular and comprises a series of compositionally and petrographically distinct granites, which can be differentiated based on petrography (one feldspar versus two) and relative concentrations of the REE and HFSE, which generally exhibit unique ranges that are characteristic of each granite. These granites are in sharp contact with the surrounding country rocks and the apparent contact between the granite complex and country rocks is outward dipping at 20º to 30º. A structural zone comprising stockwork fluorite-hematite veining and hematite-fluorite breccia occurs discontinuously along the contact between the SLAC and country rocks. The least fractionated granite is a fine-grained, massive hypersolvus granite and it exhibits the lowest concentrations of REE and HFSE in the complex; it occurs in the geometric centre of the complex. This granite is surrounded by a medium-grained, massive subsolvus granite that exhibits a distinct enrichment in REE and HFSE. Within the subsolvus granite, pegmatite and aplite sheets and dikes occur, and these are the main host to REE and HFSE mineralization and represent the latest, most fractionated phase of magmatism in the complex.

Mineralization of interest at Strange Lake occurs within per ........

A conventional open pit mining operation is proposed for the extraction of mineralized material from the B Zone rare earth element mineral deposit for the Strange Lake Project.

Mining will be undertaken by Quest using its own equipment and workforce. Specialized contractors will be used for the initial site clearing and initial haul road construction in preparation for the mining equipment fleet. Explosives, blasting agents, fuel and other consumables will be sourced from established suppliers.

The Strange Lake Project resources are contained in a single deposit. The open pit and internal phases were designed using Vulcan software, preliminary geotechnical designs, recommended standards for road widths and minimum mining widths based on efficient operation for the size of mining equipment chosen for the project.

The crushing, milling and flotation circuits located at Strange Lake have been designed to support treatment of a maximum of 1,346,000 t/y feed in the first 23 years of the operation with further capacity expansion to process a maximum of 3,170,000 t/y in the last seven years. The crushing circuit is designed to operate for 365 days per year, 12 hours per day. The grinding, flotation and dewatering circuits are designed to operate for 365 days per year, 24 hours per day.

The crushing circuit will consist of a jaw crusher to reduce run-of-mine mineralized material to -150 mm. Crushed mineralized material will be ground to a particle size of 80% passing (P80) 40 µm in a typical semi-autogenous grinding (SAG)/ball mill/pebble crusher grinding circuit in closed circuit with hydrocyclone classifiers. The grinding circuit product particle size was selected based on the required grind size for effective liberation of the rare earthand yttrium-bearing minerals.

The grinding circuit product will feed a bank of desliming hydrocyclones. The overflow from the desliming hydrocyclones, with particle size of 80% passing 10 µm, will be collected as slime and combined with the flotation concentrate to be thickened in a high-rate thickener. The desliming hydrocyclone underflow will feed the flotation circuit.

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