Vanadium explorer QEM Limited expects to release an updated resource in the coming months for its flagship Julia Creek vanadium / oil shale project.

The company recently invested more than $400,000 in seismic and drilling work at the site over a two-month period.

At the same time, it added a further tenement to its Julia Creek project, taking the total project area to about 496sq km.

General manager – geology and development Scott Drelincourt said the company was now focused on identifying the best processing route for the vanadium and oil shale to be mined at Julia Creek.

“We have processing studies underway and we’re already looking at optimising the work done, with a particular focus on flotation initially,” he said.

Mr Drelincourt said results from those studies would help QEM design its next drilling campaign.

“We feel like we’ve got something pretty big,” Mr Drelincourt said.

“We have a shallow resource and we have one of the largest vanadium deposits in the world, all very close to road and rail infrastructure.”

“Really, it ticks all the boxes that makes it very attractive as a project to develop.”

The project has an established resource of 1700 million tonnes at 0.34 per cent V2O5 (vanadium pentoxide), which QEM is confident of upgrading.

The resource also includes 589 million barrels of oil in the 3C category.

The rise of renewable energy has made vanadium a hot topic, as a material in demand for vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) and other green energy applications, as well as a raft of industrial uses.

QEM intends to make the most of the oil and vanadium resource in its project and Mr Drelincourt said its founders had been attuned to the energy transition and the ramifications for vanadium demand from day one.

Established in 2014, Queensland Energy Minerals (QEM) was granted its Julia Creek project tenements in early 2015 and started drilling straight away.

“The next year we completed our Maiden JORC Resource model and a scoping study. The Maiden JORC Resource consisted of an initial 1300 million tonne resource,” Mr Drelincourt said.

The following two years were focused on process studies to determine the optimal method to extract the vanadium.

QEM listed on the Australia Securities Exchanage (ASX) last year and has since been carrying out exploration work and processing trials, as well as adding a new tenement to the package.

“We’re currently looking to expand the resource, but also upgrade the resource category and getting it to a higher level of confidence,” Mr Drelincourt said.

“We will continue to be quite active and hopefully get out again this year for more drilling.”

The tenements, about 16km east of Julia Creek, are part of the Toolebuc Formation, recognised as one of the largest deposits of vanadium and oil shale in the world.

Other explorers targeting vanadium in the region include Intermin Resources, Vecco Group, Liontown Resources and Multicom Resources.