Member Info for Alfacomp

Pat48 - the component parts are very simple compared with anything related to Li-ion production. Basically you have

1) a membrane
2) an electrode - graphite felt
3) a bipolar plate which goes between one cell and the next - a graphite composite plate.

Bolt them together and you have a stack

Add some tanks, plumbing and pumps and you have a DC battery

Add a DC-AC inverter and you have an AC source of power

Add some thermometry and other control equipment and you have a complete system. Going from charge to discharge doesn't in principle require the control system to do anything. The pumps continue to pump in exactly the same direction, you simply change the voltage on the electrodes,

YTSS - no you are misreading my post - I believe that VRFBs will win because China is already firmly behind them and look what they did with Solar Panels. Those in the west will hum and hah and eventually get around to realising that they need to incentivise long duration energy storage to handle the solar panels they have been putting in and coal stations they have been shutting down for years and that for 4 hours plus there is nothing better than VRFBs.

At that point China will already have a number of VRFB gigabatteries installed.

Daisan,

I suspect that the buyback model is by far and away the easiest one to set up and grab some headlines from. I believe that we will discover that the BMN/BE model is much more thought through than this.

YTSS - take it up with Glencore who some believe may have made 1 billion USD as a result of the 2005 price spike. BMN and BE are playing their part in creating the VRFB ecosystem.

Daisan - I agree that a promise to buy back electrolyte at the end of life is the weakest 'leasing' offering - I too believe that a proposition that removes the upfront capital contribution of the Vanadium in the battery and replaces it with an ongoing leasing charge would eliminate the capex comparison between LiB and VRFBs.

At present people are just buying their LiBs and focussing on the initial capex only and assuming/hoping/believing the sales lie that the LiB replacement costs in 7 years time are just going to miraculously become negligible.

This is encouraged alas by those who simply parrot the hackneyed moore's law story that inevitably everything becomes cheaper and cheaper with time. This works in semiconductor circuits because you are making the transistors smaller and smaller with each generation and thus get more processing power out of the same area of silicon, and this is only possible because in information processing circuits you can store a voltage state with only a few electrons - if you looked instead at the scaling of power circuits you will see that they have not come down in price.

Furthermore I believe that the huge investment in research in lithium-ion batteries (the figure I have seen quoted is 125 Billion USD - which is about the same as the Apollo moon program) has yielded only marginal improvements in long term degradation in the last 10 years. A few percent of that figure, invested in VRFBs would have a huge impact on our ability to store energy at grid scale.

Sanchez - I believe that 100 USD will become 130 USD like it did in 2005 when blink panic sets in amongst the Vanadium traders ahead of the highly publicised 1st Nov rebar regulations date. It is entirely possible that a certain large international supplier of Vanadium may then start to release a little more of its stocks to the market.

Long term I expect that 80 USD/KgV will be maintained for 3-5 years - which would be the time it would take anyone else except Bushveld, to bring new production to market.

Daisan - all correct apart from the suggestion that leasing models are at the design stage. Those at Vanitec will know that it has been considered by the Vanadium/VRFB community since at least mid 2017 and that both VRB Energy (Pu Neng) and Vionx have asserted that they offer leasing models though only the first has come out with public information of how they will do it (they would offer an electrolyte buy back at the end of life).

I expect to see in the next few months some kind of explanation of how Bushveld Energy will fit into all this and suspect that this will incorporate some kind of Vanadium leasing arrangement that may have been cleverly financed via some of Kirkwood's contacts.

No

BBN - yes the chinese shot their last bolts when they released their 10,000 tonnes of emergency Vanadium stock in August last year. I also believe that they delayed the implementation of their new rebar regs from the end of last year to 1st November this year to try and avoid the squeeze that they are getting on Vanadium supply.

I don't think that there is anything that anyone can do now to stop the price going over 100 USD/KgV

LadyJennifer - I don't think he did say that Mining and production will be vastly bigger than energy - he actually emphasized the integrated nature of both - and this will no doubt become self-evident when the Bushveld Energy Business model is outlined further down the line.

Undoubtedly this will offer some kind of leasing model that removes the cost of the vanadium from the headline price that an Energy storage user would need to pay for a VRFB system. This is what will allow VRFBs to beat Lithium-ion not just on longevity, safety, scale and operational flexibility but also on initial capital cost.

Some countries, such as China, can install the best energy storage technology simply because it is the best technology.

Other countries such as the US, UK and Germany have a decentralised market driven energy system which has to have a system of incentives created to encourage the rolling out of useful energy storage. They typically do this at present by providing systems of service payments for grid stabilisation (over short times frames). In future long time frames will become more important as we try and find ways to permit wind and PV farms to not be forced to chuck away the energy that the tax payer has already helped pay them to harvest (as Renewable Energy becomes a greater and greater part of our energy mix this becomes more and more important.)

In order for a battery to be bought in these countries you need to stack up a series of grid stabilisation and energy storage functions to earn enough money to pay for the capital cost of the battery. Make VRFBs the same or cheaper than Lithium-ion in terms of capital cost and it's a simple comparison - with the better performing VRFB winning in a straight comparison.

I

faramog - you are quoting what is called the operational production cost - the additional cost that scales proportional to every tonne of product made - eg for digging up, transporting, grinding, concentrating, and salt roast processing.

This did not include the mine admin costs or any other quasi-fixed costs which obviously need to be spread across the total production volume - the more you make the less this adds on to each tonne opex cost. Obviously there may be a little expansion in these fixed costs when the plant capacity is increased but this is a small second order effect.

BBN - the last update from ARC gave an estimate of total production cost (including royalties, selling and mine admin costs) of USD 23.6/KgV so I think you are very close.

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-blog-1/post/analyst-watch-232

Fretblanket - it is because Long Term Holders are holding onto these shares very tightly because they know precisely what is coming.

if you want an explanation of this disconnect have a look at this:-

https://simplywall.st/stocks/ca/materials/tsx-lgo/largo-resources-shares

SNOWFLAKE DESCRIPTION
Limited growth with questionable track record.

This is what you get if you invest by numbers. The people who do this will always miss out on the big winners, and to be honest so should they - why should they be rewarded for simply following a formula, there is a reason they are not running hedge funds.

There is a sort of belief out there that 'smart' investors can make money whilst taking minimal risk by being clever with their diversification or stock screening strategy. This is the sort of fantasy that is put about by stockopedia et al.

The simple answer is that you have to be really really smart to beat the market by playing at that game - and all those guys already work for hedge funds.

It is a simpler but less scalable strategy to spot a brilliant company like BMN that has been foolishly underrated by the market. This is the sort of thing that Warren Buffett does, and what we have evidently done. We have taken minimal risk by buying into a company with world class resources and excellent management, if you can survive the nonsense that goes on in AIM whilst you cross the chasm, then companies like this will always turn out to be very unrisky.

RazorShultz - what profitability level do you think is the current benchmark - i.e what level are you comparing the 5-10 year figure with for today ?

I guess we'll know in a couple of hours time.

DarrylJ - yes you are biased because you are aware of the research that has been conducted on this board.

Pdub - taking only the 500K trades gives the minimum realistic burn rate of the wogen warrants. If there are other sells then the whole thing will be over much more quickly than anticipated and anyone silly enough to short or sell looking for a lower entry point is going to be losing money.

With the Erongo selldown there was the clear end day trade pair signature which was used, fairly accurately, to predict the overhang end date. I am sticking with the clearest signature that we have on this occasion, namely the 9.15am dump.

knuttie someone selling shares either

1) owns them and would prefer to have cash at this incredible point for the company - lack of research is no excuse as the research is plentifully available here. That only leaves distressed or someone who wants to play the short term noise.

2) doesn't own them and is shorting the share - bad move - they'll need to buy them back soon and they risk that the wogen overhang is further gone than they think and we start mobing up again like we did when the Erongo overhang cleared in March ( https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-blog-1/post/the-end-of-erongo-260 )

BMN is the Vanadium champion of South Africa, sorry Glencore we are going to overtake and outproduce you.

Furthermore Bushveld Energy is going to become the Energy Storage Champion of not just South Africa, but all of Africa.

You won't get another chance to buy into grid scale energy storage at such a cheap price. Everyone reading this should appreciate the tipping point that we are currently sitting at.