vanadium - what a by-product!, page-20

The decision by the Company to go after Vanadium in a big way has some interesting impacts. The first being that the timing of first production of either graphite or Va is now out to either late 2015 or early 2016; the second impact being revenues will obviously be much greater than if they commenced with a 220ktpa plant and then stockpiling the Va as it came out of the washing process. As georgedb said in an earlier post going after 10 ktpa of Va means an increase in graphite production from 220ktpa to 400ktpa. So I wonder what prompted them to make this change in production levels? There would be no way they would produce an extra 180ktpa of graphite per year and let it sit idle stockpiled. This would raise the COP of the graphite significantly. Reading through the company announcement of the 8th of April it would seem that there is quite a ready market for Va in both steel making and redox batteries (where the expensive stuff is used), so might Va be easier to sell than graphite and this became the driver for increased production? Or perhaps they had become aware that they could actually market much more graphite than originally intended ie 400ktpa worth and so doing something significant with the Va became a real value proposition?

I think it a given that they must have off take agreements for all the products they can produce at the new increased levels otherwise the economics don’t add up.

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