Mate I held TMT, didn't like the merger initially, but any ex TMT shareholders wondering what could've been have sold out by now.
There are some shale deposits (currently no production globally comes from shale) in QLD, you could invest in South African mines with protests and power outages, that have been selling their good assets to stay afloat. You could invest in Largo who's grades and production are plummeting, and costs rising. As others have said, if you like vanadium, AVL is really the only place to put your money. That was something I didn't put a lot of weight into pre-merger, but I do now.
I believe the company when they say they're having ongoing discussions with NAIF, and that they're confident of NAIF involvement. I also did a post the other day that there is 2.6b in the NAIF kitty, of which working off current split between NT, QLD and WA, 1.1b will be spent in WA.
They've previously done large loans of 300m for a port in the NT, and 450m for a port in the Pilbara. They lent 150m to market-darlings Pilbara Minerals (I am a shareholder).
The Federal government have highlighted vanadium as at the upper-end of the critical mineral list, as well as scored it as a 'high' for Australia's ability to produce it cost-competitively.
The chance of getting >300m from NAIF is high considering they haven't lent to vanadium yet, they haven't lent to battery technologies outside of lithium yet, and AVL's ability to offer employment in Geraldton (processing) and regionally/FIFO to the mine site. Getting a NAIF loan doesn't preclude you from an ARENA loan. We could easily get 50-100m from the Advancing Renewables Program (ARP) run through ARENA.
Suddenly we are halfway to our CAPEX target before considering offtake preproduction payments, commercial loans, further equity investment etc.
If the world wants more vanadium, AVL has to get up. There is no one closer to production than us globally.
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