Transcript
Australia is well endowed with vanadium geologically we hold probably the second largest reserves in the world second only to China. So it’s logical that if we see a bright future for vanadium that you’re going to see lots of projects developed in Australia we really think that lends a lot of weight to our story that there are aspirations not just by us but the broader market to find and then develop good assets here in Australia. What we would say differentiates us from the rest of the pack in terms of the here and now and the geology is we have what we call a Tier-1 asset and we would say why, why is it a Tier-1 asset? What is the hypothesis there?
Importantly we have a very long mine life and I think for any of these endeavours the vanadium industry really will benefit from downstream processing onshore. When you invest capital in downstream processing what you really need is a big resource to justify that capital and that’s what we have we have a very big resource. Ultimately big resource is not enough you also have to have an economic resource, our deposit is what is called a VTM vanadium titanium magnetite deposit most people would think of it like an iron ore deposit it’s actually a magnetite iron ore deposit where the vanadium the high-grade vanadium happens to be concurrent with what we call massive magnetite and that’s this thick high-grade seam of magnetite that follows in you know loosely a straight line along some 18km of our deposit and we will mine that in a simple open pit method very cost effectively and use a very simple method to concentrate it which is magnetic separation and that is the way that all primary producers in the world produce vanadium.
They have magnetite based ore bodies, they use magnetic separation to concentrate the vanadium up and ultimately the grade of the vanadium and some other deleterious elements in that concentrate will really to a large extent dictate how economic you are and that’s then driven by how effective you are at downstream processing so that’s recovery, what the cost of reagents is and ultimately what is your cost to produce vanadium oxides at high purity. What else differentiates us? We would be one of the only very advanced developers not just in Australia but globally in terms of primary production. We do consider that on a permitting basis and advancing towards financing we’re one of the most advanced development stories that investors out there could get some exposure to the vanadium industry on. What else differentiates us? I think this really does matter we are vanadium people so we’re comprised of lots of chemical engineers but also engineers who have a background in developing and operating assets in Western Australia but also operating vanadium assets and I think it’s really important to understand the pitfalls that you can get into in defining, developing and delivering a project like this. Having the right team who’s lived through good projects and bad projects can set you up for success, it’s about those early decisions during pre-feasibility, feasibility and ultimately detailed design that will dictate whether when we commence the project, we will end up ramping up and achieving positive cash flow as fast as possible and that’s the hallmark of a good project to me is the good decision making that’s leading up into commissioning and ramp up that leads to a successful ramp up and that’s really about people. People who understand the technoeconomic requirements of the project deliver success there’s always risk there and understanding what are those key risks and how can we manage those risks within the capital constraints we have and I think that’s where we really are different we’ve got a really, really good technoeconomic team to deliver that outcome.
It’s critical for AVL to be at the low end of the cost curve, some of the things that give us an advantage versus other vanadium producers is our ability to produce the lowest possible cost vanadium products and that’s based on a few characteristics that we have but number one thing is we’re innovative right we have we have a great team here we have a strong technical team and we’ve put a lot of time and effort to make sure that this process is the lowest operating cost possible and it’s also low risk. So since the merger with TMT and AVL we’ve done a lot of work to try to optimize those two projects and put together the strongest project possible, right so there’s a lot of opportunities for us to find synergies and the technical team has been diligently working on that for several months now with some good progress. One of the goals for us is to decrease CAPEX and decrease the amount of infrastructure that’s required for both projects, obviously when you merge both of these projects together, you’ll find that there was a lot overlapping infrastructure, for instance that I think we can optimize at this point to save money both CAPEX and OPEX so that’s what the team’s been working on at this point. Refining vanadium concentrates into vanadium oxides is a very complex process and we will always aim to minimize the impact to the environment. As part of our license to operate we will be doing a noise impact assessment so that we minimize the noise into the environment. What this means is ensuring we select the correct design of equipment, place them in the right location or maybe put shrouds into equipment so that it reduces the ambient noise. We are doing air quality assessments to ensure that we minimize our emissions and meet government regulatory requirements. This is done through modeling, selecting the right equipment and regular monitoring once we are in operations to ensure that we meet our requirements. With climate change a major concern we are looking at ways to reduce our carbon footprint. We are looking at introducing green hydrogen into our natural gas supply that is used for the processing plant. We will be using solar power for energy generation and using vanadium flow batteries for long duration energy storage in the sites that we will be operating in. The things that Australia brings that first of all it’s western world law and you have very clear guidelines on how to produce a project, what needs to be done, you have very honest and integrious people to work with throughout the industry and throughout government so things are very clear and easy to do. You know I won’t say Australia isn’t without its challenges there’s things that I think that the Australian Government could improve on, you know their speed to getting environmental approvals is slow. It tends to drive the timeline for a project and so I think there’s things you could do better there but that said they’re probably better than the U.S. by a long shot. Getting a mining project established there today would be quite a challenge from an environmental step.
Australia overall of all the places I’ve worked is probably the easiest to bring a project to market plus you have really good people, this is a mining country I mean especially in Western Australia. You have people here who know how to take a project from first concept, geology all the way through into production and make it happen.
