Andrew O’Donnell, managing director of Super Charged Stocks, tackled the vanadium space in a presentation at Mines and Money New York last week, discussing whether vanadium, the hottest commodity of 2018, is expected to continue that trajectory in 2019.
In an interview at the sidelines of the show, he spoke further about his belief that the vanadium story is continually growing, how more uses for the battery metal are still being explored and why investors need to continue to pay attention to its potential.
“There’s a lot of infrastructure. From the US alone, the infrastructure build would be massive. So, there is a demand for a lot of materials — vanadium is required to strengthen alloys and 92 percent of all vanadium is sold for strengthening the steel industry,” he said.
But for O’Donnell, the most exciting use of vanadium is through the redox battery.
Vanadium redox flow batteries are gaining popularity as a contender for large-scale energy storage because they are able to provide hundreds of megawatt hours at grid scale. This means that they are able to be charged thousands of times without losing capacity, while holding large amounts of energy.
“When you see people putting in, solving real-world problems and having solutions, especially with something (like) vanadium — which is clean energy, totally rechargeable, 20 years worth of storage — it’s exciting. So, to see if they can ramp it up (to) that massive scale as they are in China, it’s pretty exciting,” O’Donnell added.
While every commodity has its day, O’Donnell said, “(Vanadium is) a growing story that you need to be a part of and there’s lots of entry points on a lot of good companies.”
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