Vanadium junior calls for more collaboration

Richmond Vanadium Technology is making a timely call for more collaboration in the nascent Queensland vanadium mining industry. Managing director Jon Price addressed this week’s Queensland Exploration Council Tech Summit in Brisbane extolling the virtues of the resource on the Toolebuc formation near Julia Creek and Richmond in North-West Queensland which has attracted investment from a clutch of junior miners. Related: SMI as David faces down the net zero Goliath Richmond Vanadium Technology managing director Jon Price. The projects enjoy government, community and even international investment support in some cases but are struggling to attract the interest of institutional investors. For industry to get to the next step, it was necessary to show both investors and supporters the players were prepared to cooperate, Mr Price said. “You don't want to be building five concentrators when you can build one or two,” he said. “So we have to collaborate, whether it's corporately or whether it's tech, using technology to actually say, well, this is the way it's done best. Let's channel all of our resources and pull them and get one super successful development going. “We don't see it as a competitive environment. The demand for critical minerals is so high that we don't feel the need to have to compete and keep things secret from each other.” China was 10 years ahead of the west in adopting vanadium redox flow batteries and was now an importer which further backed the case for investment in the local industry, Mr Price said. “China has adopted the vanadium redox flow battery more than anybody else on the planet, they are 10 years ahead of us in terms of adopting large scale grid applications for vanadium batteries," he said. “So they're at the gigawatt scale. We are still at the kilowatt scale, so they are going to continue to add, I think there's four to five gigawatt hours of battery storage going into the provinces in China. “But that means that they are now a net importer. So they have less opportunity to control the market as they do now. “If they're net importing we have that great opportunity. Supply crunching, demand's growing, we've got an opportunity to come in and fill that void.” While the industry had the credentials it still faced an uphill battle with institutional investors, Mr Price said. “I think we have to get price transparency, which is one key element because an analyst of an institution will say, I can't see a price, what price can I use? “So we've got to help everyone understand the battery thematic, the market, and its supply/demand economics and particularly around transparency of pricing of a suite of vanadium products and get people to do more homework than they're doing now. “And then you'll see the transition of funding and investment moving into a higher growth commodity like vanadium as lithium peaks essentially, which we could probably see it starting to plateau now.” Video and audio of the QEC Tech Summit is being uploaded. Check the QEC website for availability. Image at top of page: Vanadium pentoxide.

Vanadium junior calls for more collaboration

Industry Queensland

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