It's headline grabbing stuff : We need ‘+330 mines in 12 years’...

It's headline grabbing stuff : We need ‘+330 mines in 12 years’ to feed battery demand.

_{At least 384 new graphite, lithium, nickel, and cobalt mines are needed in the next 12 years, Benchmark predicts97, 56,000tpa natural flake graphite mines will need to be built74 new lithium mines with an average size of 45,000 tonnes LCE by 203572 nickel mining projects with an average size of 42,500 tonnes, and 62 new cobalt mining projects of 5,000 tonnes each}

The list of minerals to build those lithium ion batteries is long - Lithium, Synthetic Graphite, Nickel, Alumnium, Cobalt, Copper, Manganese, Silicon, aluminium (High purity alumina also).


Think of all the hoops that this company tried to navigate it's way through, then consider doing that for 330 more mines.
Then refineries.
Then...
In order to ensure circularity, an entire industry of end of life recycling start ups have been committing to large scale facilities.
Green Technology Solutions, Inc., Johnson Matthey, Li-Cycle, Redwood Material (chief honcho is the guy who was top of the development of Tesla, JB Straubel), NeoMetals, Onto Technologies, Retriev Technology, Umicore to name a few.
And that frequency of recycling of Lithium batteries, every 5-10 years.

Then there is the travel footprint of all of those different ingredients which have to be shipped, mostly to China for refining & manufacturing into batteries.


The alternative - a single mine capable of producing enough concentrate to ship once to Darwin just the one commodity, Vanadium, which will be refined in a single refinery because it is a single commodity required for batteries which will not last just 5-10 years but 20-30 years & at the end of life, there is a liquid to recycle, not a whole lot of solids requiring all sort of processing methods to separate for re-use.

A story with such simplicity & so, so many great aspects to it -
Australian developed Vanadium Redox batteries - Maria Skyllas-Kazacos - like many Australian inventions (aka solar modular design - think Sun King before things went South) it was Japan that gave VRFBs a run about 40 odd years ago.
Australian unique mineral processing technology developed in conjunction with CSIRO, METS & a German based centre of engineering excellence.
A massive resource in WA coupled with a location calling out for development.

A story of large scale battery supply chain building has the potential to capture the imagination, because unlike Li-Ion batteries, there is only one material commodity to make the most of, not 5 or 6.
One Mine. One Refinery. One Gigafactory. One by One towns, then cities go off-grid.