SA’s economy may have been built on gold mining and fuelled by coal-fired power, but times are changing quickly. Gold reserves have largely run out and the world increasingly has no use for SA’s plentiful coal resources as greener power-generation technologies come to the fore.
But before you doubt the ability of SA to participate in a world gone gaga for sustainability, consider the case for a relatively obscure resource — vanadium.
Inspired by the colourful compounds it produces, the malleable metal was named after Vanadis, the Scandinavian goddess associated with love and fertility. Harder than most metals and resistant to corrosion, vanadium was the secret behind the superiority of swords made of Damascus steel, and today it is largely used to produce speciality steel alloys.
As such it’s recognised for its ability to make the steelmaking process a bit greener: in fact, just 0.2% of vanadium used in steelmaking doubles the strength of the final product, ultimately allowing for less steel to be used.
But its application in long-duration, stationary energy storage is expected to see vanadium play an essential role in future, low-carbon economies. For this reason the US, and other countries have recognised this transition metal as a strategic commodity.
Fortunately for SA, it is not only among a handful of countries that produce vanadium, it also has reserves that are unparalleled in both size and grade.
“We talk about the bushveld complex having largest resources of platinum, chrome etcetera, and yet the bushveld complex has the largest high grade primary vanadium resources anywhere in the world, by a long shot,” says Fortune Mojapelo, CEO of Bushveld Minerals, an integrated vanadium producer and one of the largest producers of the metal in the world.
As battery storage becomes key enabler to green economies, Vanadium has an important role to play in utility-scale storage in the form of Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries.
A key characteristic of vanadium is its ability to adopt multiple oxidation states. In a vanadium flow battery, two tanks contain vanadium in different oxidation states and the charging or the discharging is created through an exchange of ions between these two tanks. “Because it’s one element that you are using there is no cross contamination,” says Mojapelo.
While the recycling of batteries is of concern, Vanadium flow batteries have the edge here.
The vanadium doesn’t degrade over the life of the battery and can be used over and over again, Mojapelo says. Vanadium flow batteries come with a life expectancy of over 20 years and, once expired, the vanadium electrolyte can be put it into another battery. Alternatively, at a facility like Bushveld’s, it can be converted to ferrovanadium and sold on to steel makers.
“Of all the metals you find in the battery space, you can’t find a metal that contributes more to the circular economy than vanadium does,” Mojapelo says.
But battery storage is often seen to not yet be economically viable. Mojapelo says that is simply not true. In 2015 Sumitomo Electric Industries deployed a 60MWh vanadium flow battery to stabilise the flow of wind and solar power on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido in Japan.
In China, by far the biggest battery being deployed anywhere in the world is a vanadium flow 800MWh battery by Rongke Power, the first phase of which is due for commissioning this year.
“The idea that storage solutions are so far off, it really is a myth — these batteries are being deployed the world over and they will only get cheaper as scale grows,” Mojapelo says.
At Bushveld’s own Vamtetco mine, located near Brits, the company developed a mini-grid project fitted with a 4MWh vanadium flow battery. It was done at a small scale to get through the regulatory hurdles that, until recently, faced such installations in SA. Even so it will deliver power to Vametco at a price competitive to Eskom, Mojapelo says.
The vanadium market today is still small. As the world demand grows, SA will have more than enough to supply it. The issue, however, is the processing infrastructure.
Most vanadium is produced as a by-product from iron sands during the steelmaking process. There are few primary facilities to speak of — Bushveld’s facility is one of three in SA, and one of four in the world.
Lenders are not yet falling over themselves to fund projects for vanadium — an incredibly volatile commodity that remains little understood.
“In our view, the future comes from primary producers like ours but to do that you have to have high grade vanadium resource — that is where SA had the advantage,” Mojapelo says. “Everyone will need to look at SA to produce more Vanadium.”
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