Surefire Resources’ Victory Bore deposit in WA’s Mid West, is looking like the gift that keeps on giving after a program of 62 RC holes for 5189m delivered a 56 per increase to the operation’s already hefty vanadium resource. The asset now tips the skills at 235 million tonnes at 0.39 per cent vanadium pentoxide and sets the company up for an exciting 2023 which management has hailed as a critical year for the sector.
Notably, Surefire says its Victory Bore-sourced vanadium boasts excellent metallurgical properties which could position the operation as an economically viable play if its bulk mining and preconcentration beneficiation activities go to plan.
The deposit forms part of the company’s larger Victory Bore-Unaly Hill vanadium project which also takes in the Unaly Hill resource to the south-west. Following the bumper increase, the total resource for both deposits has swelled to a monstrous 321 million tonnes at 0.40 per cent vanadium pentoxide.
Together the deposits hold one of the largest vanadium oxide resources in Western Australia and management believes the asset still offers headroom for additional discovery given it has only probed about 1.4 kilometres of an untested 8-kilometre-long banded iron formation, or “BIF” magnetic anomaly at the site.
Management now plans to integrate data from the close spaced infill drilling program into an economic prefeasibility study which could push the company closer to production.
Surefire has completed a swath of drilling in the zone of late following the recent discovery of three parallel mineralised lodes with broad vanadium intercepts of up to 56m at 0.48 per cent vanadium pentoxide. The 56m interval sat inside a zone the company has flagged as its Middle Lode and subsequent probes across the nearby Central Lode yielded an up to 38m parcel of vanadium grading up to 0.42 per cent. Drilling at the nearby West Lode returned an up to 60m strike running a grade of up to 0.23 per cent.
The untapped BIF lode is positioned around 100m from the company’s West Lode.
The current workstream follows an increase in the demand of vanadium following the commodities ongoing use in the production of redox flow batteries. The devices have been flagged as the next generation of energy storage devices capable of storing electricity for utility networks, commercial premises and industrial sites in addition to energy spawned from solar and wind-powered operations.
In turn WA’s Mid West is shaping up as a hotbed of vanadium development with ASX-listed Neometals and a subsidiary of Australian Vanadium Limited recently forging links to potentially set up a shared processing hub in the region. The duo believes the regional treatment hub could unlock the area’s critical and battery mineral projects by offering processing options to third party enterprises.
The market for vanadium appears in overdrive given the commodity’s links to vanadium redox flow batteries which has experienced an unprecedented demand spike over the last few years. Between 2018 to 2020 demand for dry vanadium has over doubled to almost 24,000 metric tonnes and a recent study by S&P Global Insights suggests the commodity could continue its solid run of form.
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By Matt Birney
