Allana Potash Corp. announced yesterday that it had signed a feasibility study contract with ERCOSPLAN Ingenieurgesellschaft Geotechnik und Bergbau for its Ethiopian Potash Project.

The feasibility study is scheduled to be completed in the second half of 2012 and will begin immediately.

Additional equipment is being mobilized to the site and expansion of the camp is underway according to Farhad Abasov, president and CEO of Allana.

Late in August, Allana Potash Corp. had awarded an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment Study (ESIA) on its Ethiopia potash project to Environmental Resources Management (ERM).

The ESIA is scheduled to be completed around August 2012 and will form an integral part of the feasibility study the company initiated yesterday.

ERCOSPLAN is going to investigate the potential to extract potash via open pit mining as well as solution mining and solar evaporation, for the production of MOP and SOP products.

With relatively shallow potash deposit Allana will consider open pit mining method in addition to solution mining. The company expects that by the end of this year technical and economic parameters of open pit and solution mining methods will have been examined so that the management can determine what the optimal mining method is at the initial production stage.

Once the mining method has been determined the rest of the feasibility study will focus on the details based on that method.

ERCOSPLAN has been involved in Allana's Ethiopian Potash project since 2008.

Source: Marketwire