QEM and the University of Queensland have produced the first high-purity vanadium pentoxide from an industrial waste stream in Australia, blazing a new pathway to feed battery market demand.

QEM has agreements to collect vanadium-bearing spent catalyst from Incitec Pivot’s Mount Isa sulphuric acid plant and Sun Metals Corporation’s Townsville Zinc Refinery.

It aims to provide a circular economy solution to this industrial waste stream by extracting the vanadium and putting it back into the economy as a high-value product.

The company announced today that UQ had achieved success in a small-scale laboratory demonstration of all the processing steps in recycling the vanadium catalyst into a high-purity vanadium oxide product.

“With UQ’s assistance, QEM seeks to accelerate the introduction of Queensland-sourced and processed V2O5 into the market,” QEM managing director Gavin Loyden said.

He noted that QEM remained committed to its goal of supplying vanadium pentoxide from its primary vanadium resource at Julia Creek.

“This collaboration with UQ builds on QEM’s umbrella agreement with the university from September 2022 when The University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute (UQ SMI) commenced mineral characterisation and beneficiation work for QEM’s flagship critical minerals project by characterising the mineralogy of QEM’s Julia Creek shale post-oil extraction to assist in optimising vanadium beneficiation to further improve vanadium pentoxide yields,” he said.

The research and development project involving spent catalyst is part of the Critical Minerals Trailblazer program.

Project leader UQ Associate Professor James Vaughan said it was an exciting demonstration of the circular economy of vanadium, the key ingredient in vanadium flow batteries which could provide large-scale and long-duration energy storage.

UQ is optimising processing conditions for subsequent piloting, as well as producing larger samples of V2O5 for potential future marketing purposes.

Image at top of page: University of Queensland Hydrometallurgy Research Laboratories team members Tseveenkhuu Darinchuluun (in the foreground), Vitor Loureiro and James Gudgeon.