JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Aim-listed Bushveld Minerals on Monday announced the results of a scoping study for its 52-million-tonne Bushveld vanadium project, stating that the project enjoyed robust economics with significant upside opportunities.

Bushveld CEO Fortune Mojapelo pointed out that, at 10 370 t/y, using a modest capital expenditure of $262-million, the project would be one of the world’s largest low-cost primary vanadium producers with attractive economics on a post-tax basis.

“The post-tax numbers did not assume any tax incentives in South Africa that may exist in support of in-country beneficiation. We believe that, given South Africa’s intent to promote in-country beneficiation, there could be tax incentives available to the project, which would improve these economics,” he added.

Bushveld stated that, following the scoping study, a salt roast processing route had been selected for the project, as it best fit in with the company’s project development criteria, which included first quartile cost curve position, a proven path to near-term production, low capital expenditure and scalability.

Mojapelo said the chosen salt roast processing flow sheet was well known in South Africa and was considered commercially favourable.

“There are at least three operations making use of this process – including Glencore’s Rhovan and Evraz’s Vametco operations,” he pointed out.

Meanwhile, the scoping study also indicated a pre-tax net present value (NPV) for the project of $561.9-million and a post-tax NPV of $263.6-million.

Operating costs were expected to be around $5.99/kg or $2.72/lb of vanadium oxide flakes.

The life-of-mine would be 30 years, with payback to start four years and four months from the start of mining.

Bushveld indicated that there were a number of opportunities to further improve the project economics from those presented in the scoping study, including potential to extract additional value from the 650 000 t/y of iron-rich calcine dumps, and the ability to convert its vanadium oxide flake output to a higher-value product such as ferrovanadium.

There was also potentially scope to process the high-grade ore contained in the main magnetite layer’s hanging wall, which was currently treated as waste in determining the project’s stripping ratio, as well as to access additional tonnages at a greater depth than the 80 m assumed in the scoping study.

Mojapelo said the company would take the project forward with an accelerated prefeasibility study, which had already started, to further investigate its potential.