Toro Energy (TOE) has successfully integrated vanadium into the Lake Maitland uranium resource, which is part of the Wiluna Uranium Project in Western Australia.
Earlier this year, the company announced it was going to add vanadium to the project, after completing laboratory tests in 2019.
The new resource is now with engineers, SKR Consulting, to re-optimise the proposed Lake Maitland mine based on the new data and processing flowsheet.
Toro is planning to turn Lake Maitland into a stand-alone operation due to its potential.
Re-optimisation of the project includes the costs associated with the most recently designed processing flowsheet.
“During the re-optimisation process the mining engineers will also revisit the planned mining methods to investigate if the increased knowledge gained from research on the Lake Maitland deposit over recent years can translate into a less complex and cheaper mining method at Lake Maitland,” the company said.
“If so, this cheaper method will be used in the re-optimisation process.”
The new Lake Maitland resource contains 14 million pounds of vanadium along with the 26.4 million pounds of uranium, already estimated at 200 parts per million uranium cut off.
Engineering studies for Lake Maitland to be a stand-alone operation and producing vanadium as a by-product is in its final stages.
Why add vanadium?
Toro added vanadium as the previous testwork found that it can be produced as a valuable by-product of processing uranium at only a small cost.
Given the expected long-term growth in price of vanadium and the potential future demand, including from vanadium redox batteries (VRB), Toro believes producing vanadium as a by-product is likely to result in a significant improvement to the feasibility and value of the project.
Notably, vanadium flake is currently trading at US$8.40 (around A$11.82) per pound, which in 2018 was trading as high as US$28.80 per pound.
There is also potential for this price to rise again due to the demand for VRBs, which is an efficient storage and re-supply solution for renewable energy. China in particular is heavily investing in VRBs, according to Toro.
The biggest demand for vanadium metal by far comes from the steel industry where it is used in the production of vanadium steel alloys, as well as in specialised aeronautical alloys, chemicals and batteries.
On the market today, Toro Energy was down 2.17 per cent and is trading at 2.3 cents per share at 1:33 pm AEDT.
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