Off the back of strong vanadium demand and a surging price, multi-element explorer Surefire Resources is looking to shift gears and move forward with its Victory Bore-Unaly Hill vanadium project in Western Australia’s Mid West region.
The company’s Victory Bore and Unaly Hill inferred resources combine to form a whopping 237 million tonnes of ore going 0.43 per cent vanadium pentoxide and 5.9 per cent titanium dioxide with iron credits.
Surefire says prices for the specialty metal are up 60 per cent since the beginning of the year, with vanadium pentoxide in its flake form reaping US$12.10 a pound – or $37,050 a tonne in Aussie dollars.
Declaring a world-class resource containing over two billion pounds of vanadium pentoxide, the company is now knuckling down to develop its project.
Stacking its inventories even higher, Surefire has also tabled an additional exploration target at Victory Bore of 150-200Mt of ore going between 0.4 and 0.7 per cent vanadium pentoxide, 22 to 40 per cent iron and 6 to 8 per cent titanium dioxide.
The company is currently running the numbers in a scoping study to get a better feel for the project’s economic viability.
A second phase of metallurgical testing and further drilling is planned to gain more confidence in its resource, that in turn will set the project up for a pre-feasibility study.
Importantly, vanadium’s demand is driven by its application in a variety of burgeoning industries including the manufacture of large capacity battery storage, steel and speciality aeronautical alloys, nuclear reactors and even military equipment. Surefire is not the only one that sees the global vanadium market as a pot set to boil over.
Industry research group Technavio has forecasted the market to grow by 28,310t lifting off its base of 73,000t from the period 2020 to 2024. Notably, the projection was made before any of the Russian related geopolitics kicked off and it’s a potentially huge variable as the current international pariah accounts for about 25 per cent of the current global supply.
Whilst traditionally about 86 per cent of vanadium is consumed in the steel industry, the five per cent consumed in energy storage is anticipated to grow rapidly as the globe marches towards net-zero. Global Industry Analysts suggest the global market for vanadium redox batteries will attract nearly $238m in 2022 and grow at a staggering compound annual growth rate of 20.9 per cent to US$592.4m by 2026.
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