Date: Mar 6, 2019
Chinese buyers are willing to pay more for ferro-vanadium as Pursuit mulls its options for selling its high-grade vanadium magnetite concentrate from its fast progressing projects in Sweden and Finland.
A buoyant domestic market has reversed the downward trend of the Chinese vanadium price, which has gained over 5 per cent since mid-January.
Meanwhile, the price in Europe has remained relatively steady since early January.
Ferro-vanadium is used to strengthen steel.
Both vanadium magnetite concentrate and vanadium pentoxide flake can be used to make ferro-vanadium, but vanadium pentoxide flake is also used in batteries for energy storage and requires a more complicated and expensive process to refine it ready for use in batteries.
Pursuit Minerals has two key vanadium projects in Scandinavia; Airijoki in Sweden and Koitelainen in Finland.
It has already proven it can produce high-grade vanadium magnetite concentrate from both its projects, with the Koitelainen concentrates being amongst the highest grade globally.
“What we are looking at doing is developing our projects in a way that shortens the timeline to production by just producing a high-grade vanadium magnetite concentrate,” managing director Jeremy Read told Stockhead.
“That should enable us to take a couple of years out of the project development pipeline, in comparison to companies looking to produce vanadium pentoxide flake, so we can start to look at shorter term pricing.”
