Critical Minerals Group has begun metallurgical testwork at its Lindfield vanadium project in Queensland to assess ore from its maiden drill program in order to create the most efficient processing flowsheet.
At the same time the company has engaged a specialist laboratory to investigate the potential for the ore to be used in the production of high-purity aluminium.
Lindfield has an inferred JORC resource of 210 million tonnes at a grade of 0.39 per cent vanadium oxide from surface. The deposit is shallow with a cut-off grade of 0.3 per cent vanadium oxide.
Late last year Critical Minerals completed its maiden drill campaign at Lindfield where it sunk a total of 23 air-core holes for 860m in addition to one open hole and three water monitoring holes. The program was designed to strengthen the geological understanding of the mineralisation at the site, with the aim of potentially increasing the known resource and to assist in its plan to provide ore for metallurgical testing.
In addition to the ongoing testwork, the company has also expanded its holdings in Queensland after the state’s Department of Resources granted the Whinmoor project to Critical’s wholly owned subsidiary CMG 3 for a five-year term. The site sits close to the Lindfield project where the subsidiary plans to expand on work by previous explorers and known extensions to vanadium mineralisation at the company’s flagship project.
Vanadium has been traditionally used in high-strength, low-alloy steel, however the current hype surrounding the metal is due to its central role in vanadium redox flow batteries that are suited to large, grid scale energy storage solutions. Its rise is such that it is now considered one of the new economy minerals used in advanced and renewable energy technologies.
Vanadium batteries have been found to handle more charge cycles, are easily expandable at little extra cost, are safer and have a lower decay rate than lithium-ion batteries, making them ideal for large-scale storage applications such as utilities.
In 2021 the Queensland Government committed $10 million from the “Invested in Queensland” program towards a vanadium common user facility in Townsville for an industrial pilot and demonstration facility for mineral processing. Critical Minerals plans to leverage off the significant grants and incentives put in place to develop domestic vanadium production with a particular focus on vanadium redox flow batteries as a grid scale energy solution.
Just last week the Queensland Government allocated $75 million to the facility to support further extraction of high purity alumina, cobalt and rare earths in addition to vanadium production. The operation will be located at the Cleveland Bay Industrial Park in Townsville and is intended to trial production processes for commercialisation, enabling prospective miners like Critical to begin producing mineral samples at scale.
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