Plenty of good vanadium news all of which is bullish for Largo, with a currently large production and capacity to expand significantly. A going concern, without all the delays and cost of a wannabe miner--dozens of those. Relevant part of an article in today's Investor intel. The emerging need for large-scale electricity storage makes vanadium redox-flow batteries (VRBs) a major potential future use of vanadium. Due to their large scale storage capacity, development of VRBs could prompt increases in the use of wind, solar, and other renewable power sources normally considered too intermittent to be feasible. Lithium-vanadium-phosphate batteries produce high voltages and high energy-to-weight ratios, which make them ideal for use in electric cars. Vanadium use in lithium batteries is expected to increase to 1,700 tonnes in 2017 from only 200 tonnes in 2012.
The main advantages of VRBs is fourfold, namely;
- their nearly unlimited capacity, which is made possible simply by using sequentially larger storage tanks,
- their ability to be left completely discharged for long periods of time with no detrimental effects,
- the ease of recharging them by replacing the electrolyte if no power source is available to recharge it,
- and their ability to withstand permanent damage if the electrolytes are accidentally mixed.
As part of the second phase of testing, the companies demonstrated efficient processing of a plethora of feedstocks, with 95% of the material being recovered in the case of magnetite. A variety of slags, calcine and magnetite were tested that related industries either cannot currently process efficiently or avoid entirely due to the significant release of greenhouse gases.
Recovery of vanadium as vanadyl sulfate used a precursor for the preparation of vanadium electrolyte (VE) was also successful, as was demonstrating the full potential of the VanadiumCorp-Electrochem chemical technology for primary production and monetization of waste materials. Titania and silica were also recovered as value added byproducts with good marketable values.
Crucially, vanadium, along with titanium and 21 other materials, have just been included in the first comprehensive update on the US mineral resource landscape since the 1973 Oil Crisis. USGS Professional Report 1802 recognizes 23 minerals as critical to “national economy and national security”; the report also appears to promote VRBs as a preferable option for mass energy storage just as VanadiumCorp is coming close to perfecting its electrolyte production process.