Not sure how niobium relates to the lithium battery value chain but...
ALK has niobium as a part of the DZP project. Steadily advancing but Nb is just 16% of the projected revenue
GBE has been plugging away at the Kanyika Niobium (with some tantalum) project in Malawi since pre GFC days - a pure play with a JORC (68Mt @ 0.15% Nb) and cash at bank (13.8m vs 10.3m mc...) but no offtake partners. It has been a long long time coming. Had a little bit of GBE once - lost a little money, lost all interest...
CXX is a newer pure play with the Panda Hill project in Tanzania (50% interest since 2013). Has a JORC and shiny new DFS with plan to mine 72Mt at 0.54% Nb over 30 years. MC is 48m, cash <3m.
I'm not aware of any other active projects on the ASX but if the price spiked, then no doubt 100 companies would announce that they were sitting on the best prospective ground...
Demand has been flat for a long time so I'm not sure why you could expect price to spike from a demand shift. Supply side is a different matter - this
article gives some insights. But then again, how quickly could existing players ramp up? Fairly quickly I would have thought.
I don't see Nb as the next Lithium. A commodity with such a genuinely explosive demand side story is a very rare event - it might be quite a wait before we see the next one.
