An aspiring vanadium miner and battery maker says the heavy gas focus of $1.5 billion of federal funding for a sustainable development precinct near Darwin risks thwarting the clean energy transition and the development of critical minerals processors to help reduce Western dependence on China.
Grant Wilson, executive chairman of Tivan, an ASX company which lays claim to the world’s largest hard rock vanadium resource, wants to process the mineral and manufacture vanadium redox flow batteries in the Northern Territory government’s Middle Arm Sustainable Development Precinct across Darwin Harbour from the CBD.
Unlike better known lithium-ion batteries, vanadium redox flow types boast superior durability when it comes to recharging and fewer recycling challenges.
Tivan announced on Wednesday that Maria Skyllas-Kazacos, who invented and patented vanadium redox flow battery technology at the University of NSW, had joined the company’s technical advisory group.
Tivan signed a letter of intent last month to buy up to 300 megawatts of power annually from Sun Cable, the developer of a giant solar-battery project which has just been bought out of administration by software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners.
Mr Wilson said Tivan was the first Sun Cable strategic partner to go public because it wanted to show its support for the energy project as well as the NT government’s vision for the Middle Arm Sustainable Development Precinct.
He supports the development of Sun Cable’s NT supply business as a first step in developing the vast project ahead of its ultimate goal of building an undersea cable to supply Singapore, a stance supported by Quinbrook, and he expects to be joined in the precinct by other developers of hydrogen, battery and gas projects.
But Mr Wilson said $1.5 billion of federal subsidies announced by the Albanese government overwhelmingly supported gas infrastructure and muddied the original purpose of the precinct to support sustainable development, exposing it to pressure from activists opposed to the development of the giant Beetaloo gas deposit.National security
This risked undermining the government’s ambitions for Australia to lead the world in critical minerals and clean energy as well as Western democracies’ national security imperative to reduce dependence on China for critical minerals.
“Next generation companies have received no support. It could be argued that the subsidy, as designed, is working against the energy transition. It is an anomalous situation as the federal government is facing forward and saying it is ‘all in’ on renewables and critical minerals,” Mr Wilson said.
He said Tivan’s plans for vanadium processing and battery processing were a first-mover example of energy expert Ross Garnaut’s clean energy superpower thesis, which argues Australia can use its lowest cost clean energy to process metals and other commodities and seize an opportunity to decarbonise up to 8 per cent of the world’s emissions.
“Critical minerals processing also requires large-scale water infrastructure, the capability to source reagents (acids) economically, and a highly skilled workforce. We are also working within strict environmental constraints, and dutifully earning our social licence to operate. It is a multi-faceted challenge, yet in our case, eminently achievable.”
Infrastructure, transport and regional development minister Catherine King rejected Mr Wilson’s characterisation of the funding. Ms King said via a spokeswoman the government is funding common-use infrastructure at Middle Arm such as specialist product wharves and offloading facilities for manufacturing “to give all potential users in the market the opportunity to grow and thrive, including those able to process and export clean energy and critical minerals”.
“Funding will go towards infrastructure that will support users to export clean energy critical to meet our commitment to Net Zero, not only green hydrogen, but the manufacture and export of lithium batteries that are critical to global energy transition and decarbonisation.”
In February, Tivan purchased from King River Resources the Speewah vanadium deposit in northern Western Australia – the world’s largest high-quality resource of the mineral – to add to its Mount Peake resource in the NT, giving it “unique and durable competitive advantages” that could include dominance of Western vanadium supply and effective pricing control.
“Speewah is a monumental resource, the largest, highest quality vanadium resource globally, and a strategic asset for the country. Our processing technology is also a game changer, home-grown with our partners at CSIRO,” Mr Wilson said.
“We stand in sharp contrast to lithium and rare earths, which are basically global feedstocks. We have the capability to build the entire value chain for grid storage batteries in scale in Australia. That is the plan.”
The boldness of Tivan’s ambition dwarfs its $128 million value on the ASX, and many obstacles must be overcome to bring the plan to fruition.
The company wants to bring in a major partner to make vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFB) using technology invented by Ms Skyllas-Kazacos at the University of NSW but commercialised by Chinese and Japanese companies after her patents expired. It has also added Stéphane Leblanc, a former Rio Tinto executive with vast experience of complex project development, to its technical advisory group.
Tivan’s challenges
One of the many challenges Tivan faces is that VRFB batteries have much higher costs than lithium-ion batteries, which have enjoyed nearly two decades of massive investments in R&D and manufacturing capacity by Elon Musk’s Tesla, China’s BYD and other Asian giants.
Mr Wilson is relying on several advantages to bridge the gap over time. The first is the immense size of the Speewah deposit – more than 4.5 billion tonnes of ore-producing concentrate with up to 2.4 per cent vanadium. Successfully developed, this would be large enough to give Tivan dominance over Western supply and pricing and it would justify investments in R&D needed to make VRFB batteries competitive with lithium-ion batteries and pumped hydro storage. (Speewah also contains commercial quantities of titanium and iron.)
Western governments, especially the US, may help because of national security goals to rapidly expand production of alternatives to lithium-ion batteries, the supply of which China dominates. US President Joe Biden last week vowed to seek congressional approval for Australian developers to apply for $US750 million (more than $1 trillion) of subsidies available for critical minerals development under his administration, alongside US and Canadian companies.
Current global supplies of vanadium are also dominated by China and Russia and the main use is for strengthening steel for defence and aeronautics equipment.
Vanadium also has the advantage of not degrading or causing the spontaneous fires that lithium-ion batteries occasionally suffer from. There are no recycling problems, Mr Wilson said. Although the project will initially rely on gas for energy, Sun Cable coming online as planned later this decade would dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of Tivan’s vanadium electrolyte, the raw material for VRFB batteries.
Sun Cable’s proposed first stage involves 900 megawatts of power for Darwin and 1.8 gigawatts to be cabled to Singapore. But the project’s tumble into administration after a dispute between Mr Cannon-Brookes and his former co-investor, billionaire Andrew Forrest, and Quinbrook’s emergence as a partner in the buyout, have placed a question mark over the Singapore part of the project. A review of the business plan may put Singapore on the back burner initially.
Mr Wilson said Tivan wanted to work with Sun Cable to facilitate the large-scale supply of clean energy to the MASDP and it supported Quinbrook’s more cautious approach.
“As with any major project, we think there is merit in ‘crawl, walk, run’. If that means that Sun Cable’s new owners prioritise Darwin, we would of course welcome that,” he said.
Global recognition
Tivan said in a statement that as the inventor of VRFB batteries, Ms Skyllas-Kazacos “holds unique prestige in the sector, and is globally recognised for her ongoing technical contributions to the commercialisation of the technology”.
Mr Wilson said: “I am delighted she has recognised the opportunity and capability we have to broaden and deepen the commercialisation pathway for VRFB on a global basis, consistent with Tivan’s strategic mission.”
Ms Skyllas-Kazacos said: “After getting to know Grant in recent months, I realised that we share the same passion for clean energy and a carbon-free future. It’s been a very long wait, but the time for the clean energy transition has finally arrived and I am so happy to see that the VFB is being recognised as an important enabling technology for this transition.”
Mr Wilson, a former financial analyst and columnist with The Australian Financial Review, wrested control of Tivan from its former board after an activist campaign last year. The company was previously known as TNG.
