Surefire Resources is eyeing a November delivery of the prefeasibility study (PFS) for its Victory Bore vanadium play, clearing the way for the next step in commercialising the project’s massive deposit in Western Australia’s Mid West region.
Victory Bore’s PFS has previously been flagged for some time between the middle and end of this year. But Surefire has now narrowed its estimated time of arrival. The company says: “The PFS is progressing on track for completion by November 2023 and currently there are no issues.”
Surefire says a number of milestone tasks have already been completed or are well under progress, with the mining licence application submitted and CAPEX and OPEX estimates being updated.
Its combined Victory Bore and neighbouring Unaly Hill resources constitute one of Australia’s biggest undeveloped deposits of vanadium, totalling 321 million tonnes and averaging 0.39 per cent vanadium pentoxide.
The project is 400km from the Geraldton port and close to existing infrastructure, including gas. It boasts a 20km strike of contiguous high-grade vanadium between Victory Bore and Unaly Hill.
Surefire has its eye on selling vanadium to both the mineral’s traditional steel market, in addition to the emerging vanadium redox battery market. The company’s aim is to produce high-purity vanadium oxide in liquid form, from which high-purity vanadium electrolyte can be extracted for the production of vanadium batteries.
It is also making preliminary plans for the completion of further drilling to enable the deposit’s measured resources to be converted into a JORC-compliant reserve, providing an economic foundation for advancing the project.
Management recently revealed it had hired METS Engineering to conduct further metallurgical testwork on its vanadium samples. But it has already concluded that the Victory Bore magnetite hosts relatively clean intrinsic vanadium, which should lead to a simple and cleaner separation in processing.
In addition, Surefire is evaluating Victory Bore’s potential to deliver high-purity alumina (HPA), which currently sells at about US$20,000 (AUS$30,000) per tonne and offers the prospect of selling options to burgeoning markets such as semi-conductors, CO2 emission separators, LED lighting and lithium-ion battery cells. That work is being undertaken by Lava Blue and the initial testwork, including leaching and concentration of liquor, has been completed.
Surefire says the results of both studies – into HPA and METS’ metallurgical work – may be incorporated into Victory Bore’s PFS.
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By Mark Irving
