Well, they will have a fair bit of work cut out for them just to make a scoping study that's worth more than a bag of clay.
The flow sheet is about as cartoonish as it gets - vanadium purification, in one handy little box. That's usually a $350M cost item right there for a conventional vanadium mine, let alone what appears to be a acid leach with a SX-EW.
Solvent extraction for vanadium appears to be akin to herding cats. I mean, what's the vanadium ion in solution? Vanadium bisulfate? V(S04)2? Or is it a V5+ ion, or what? And what is the organic compound used to strip the pregnant leach liquor of vanadium, and who provides this mystery chemical, for how much?
To what specification is this magic purification box producing the vanadium product, and what product? Vanadium pentoxide, or a sulphate product? 99.5% V2O5, or a 98% V2O5? And the deleterious elements like the alkali metals, what's the product specifications for that?
I, for one, will be interested to see what the process flowsheet looks like, and what the equipment list of as yet never before made items looks like, once the scoping study is out. Then it's just a couple of dozen million dollars of money spent tinkering with what is looking suspeciously like an atmospheric leach circuit stolen off a nickel laterite processing route, complete with mystical amounts of hypothetical Ni-Cu-Co (as sulphates, no doubt).
Plus, I wonder where they got their market data claiming India as well as China was mandating more vanadium in rebar?
Expand
(20min delay)