TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Project developer Vanadiumcorp has entered into discussions with interested parties including academia, energy storage companies, government organisations, vanadium industry professionals and independent contractors, as it seeks to develop favourable metallurgy and processing of material from its flagship Lac Dore project, in Quebec.
The Vancouver-based company planned to grow its target market by selling competitively priced vanadium electrolyte (VE) with the lowest-cost production and process model.
"The key to commercialisation of vanadium batteries is the supply of VE at the right price, as VE is the largest cost component of vanadium redox batteries (VRB). VRBs are emerging as the technology of choice for grid storage and as an alternative to competing technologies with a longer life cycle, superior safety and unlimited capacity.
“Demand is outpacing supply and the largest high-purity vanadium market in the world is located in North America,” stated president and CEO Adriaan Bakker on Thursday.
The company advised that it was currently undertaking a preliminary economic assessment (PEA), making use of market pricing based on specialty vanadium products that reflected a significant premium to the metallurgical grade vanadium oxide flake market.
“The objective is to affect a significant reduction in cost per kWh of the VRB through direct, low-cost VE production. Targeting a high purity processing model allows the unique possibility of on site, primary VE production and a diverse specialty product mix for increased market flexibility.
“Ultimately, our goal in process development is to produce specialty high-purity vanadium products like VE at a similar cost of conventional vanadium oxide flake production for steel alloys,” Bakker noted.
The company expected to announce more strategic partners before publishing its VE and high-purity vanadium focused PEA.