Neometals nails down costs of vanadium recovery play

With numerous businesses reporting inflationary and rising operating costs, emerging battery metals producer Neometals has released highly encouraging engineering figures for its proposed vanadium pentoxide recovery plant in Finland that potentially puts it in the lowest cost category.  The company is planning a joint venture to recover the high-purity metal oxide from by-product slag created during the steel making process.

Neometals has an option to secure a 50-50 partnership with unlisted Australian mineral development company Critical Metals to construct a facility in Pori, Finland to process and recover the critical mineral vanadium from slag generated by Scandinavian steel maker SSAB.

It struck the deal in April 2020 and is hoping for a final investment decision at the end of this year, with production potentially starting in 2025.

Vanadium has been on the list of critical raw materials since 2017. With renegade Russia supplying the bulk of Europe’s vanadium feedstock,  Neometals’ vanadium recovery project could be a strategically important asset.

The vanadium recovery project, or “VRP1” partners are compiling a feasibility study after just completing an engineering cost study with assistance from leading Nordic engineering group Sweco Industry.

Neometals said the results of the engineering cost study confirms the  potential for the lowest quartile operating costs, compared with its vanadium- producing competitors and aligns with previous studies. It has been finetuned to 15 per cent variance,  compared with the previous minus 20 per cent to plus 25 per cent differential.

The project’s capital cost is likely to be $341 million for the construction of buildings, infrastructure and process plant and includes initial treatment of  300,000 dry metric tonnes of slag per year through an operation at Tahkoluoto Port, near the City of Pori in Finland.

The company says the location has excellent infrastructure, including a deep-water port and was chosen after the completion of an extensive location study.

Neometals has developed a proprietary hydrometallurgical process to recover vanadium from steel slag, utilising conventional equipment and operates at atmospheric pressure and mild temperatures.

Pilot plant testing was completed in Perth, Western Australia and resulted in product purities of more than 99.5 per cent vanadium pentoxide, with maximum metallurgical recoveries greater than 75 per cent.

The feedstock slag is treated in a selective leach circuit to enable dissolution of the vanadium contained in the feed. The resultant leach solution is then separated from the solid leach residue.

The vanadium solution is further purified by solvent extraction and recovered as ammonium metavanadate and transformed to vanadium pentoxide using industry standard methods.

Neometals Managing Director, Chris Reed said: “Completion of the engineering cost study has provided additional confidence in the operating and capital costs of VRP1. The teams have significantly reduced the technical risk of the project. Combining this high-grade feed stock with our innovative process flowsheet can deliver very high purity, low-cost vanadium chemicals globally with a very low carbon footprint.”

Reed says Neometals is keeping the global economic and geopolitical outlook in mind, the current state of financial markets and the fall in the vanadium price which has increased the financial risk of the project.

Neometals recently appointed well regarded battery metals executive Merrill Gray to the senior leadership team as head of recycling.  She takes the helm of the lithium-ion battery recycling business unit that is in a JV partnership with German-based SMS Group in the metals recycling Primobius business. 

Her last role was Managing Director at ASX-listed Hexagon Energy Materials.

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