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Sanchez - everything is in the Annual Report as Fortune does not like giving people surprises. Everyone needs to read it to know what is coming. It will be inevitably be brownfield and that can only mean Vanchem. He doesn't want to have to borrow 200M USD of cash like Largo had to to build Maracas - he is sitting in a country with existing processing capacity that is just begging to be used, everyone knows it and Terry Perles stated the same in his talk to the International Flow Battery Forum when asked by Professor Maria Skylas Kazacos where future Vanadium was going to be coming from.

Coffeecups - no the sumitomo data is almost definitely real - they have been sitting on this data for years and Vanitec have had to encourage them strongly to make it more public.

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/trading-analysis-12th-july-2018-271

Coffeecups - just checking my notes - the 275,000 mentioned by Gary Yang of UET was for a Sumitomo machine in the field. UET's own 6 year data was for 15,000 cycles 0-100% complete change of state of charge (SOC).

He showed some nice clear data on loss of capacity as a function of cycle no for a wide range of different manufacturer's lithium ion batteries - this will be available in the conference slides when they are available. Needless to say there was no loss of capacity for VRFBs after 15,000 cycles (6 years).

... just double the electrolyte and not the power stacks. To double the amount of energy stored in a solid state battery you need to double everything. It's like having a buy a second computer when all you want is a RAM upgrade - it's very silly.

kevkan - well to be honest the key features that battery manufacturers are stressing is:

1) long life - 20 years. UET showed data from 275,000 cycles. Sumitomo presented real operational data for a 60MWh VRFB that has been running for over 6 years in all sorts of useful modes.

2) safety - UET pointed out that the New York Fire Department will not allow any energy storage in the city of New York that uses Lithium. It's not just the explosive nature of any Lithium-ion battery fires it's also the fluorine gas that would be liberated in a fire.

3) cost - once you take the lifetime of the battery correctly into account and do a Levelised cost of storage (LCOS) eg Lazard 3 calculation then VRFB's are already cost competitive with Lithium-ion

4) sublinear cost scaling for longer duration batteries - this is where the arguments seem to get overly complex but this is really the critical issue so I will go into it in detail.

At present most large scale batteries (even the Jamestown 129MWh one in Australia - Musk's claimed world's biggest) on the grid are essentially used as a power reserve for (sometimes called a spinning reserve because previously it was the spinning nature of all the turbines that acted as a short term energy store that would smooth out fluctuations in demand/supply) - these are fluctuations over a few minutes or so.

Lithium-ion batteries are fine for those types of timescales and you get to boast that you charged and discharged your battery lots of times in a day and so can earn money if your local grid pays you to provide a power reserve, which is the application that grids first came up with incentivisation payments for (so called enhanced frequency regulation.)

Another thing that grids imagine is the idea that the might be able to avoid having to build so called peaker plants that are usually open cycle gas turbines, so can be switched on and off quite quickly, but which are very inefficient. Using a battery instead of a peaker plant might require discharge timescales of 20-30 minutes, but it is still very early days and I'm not sure many grids have worked out exactly how they can pay people to build electrochemical peaker plants (which is fed with electricity instead of gas) in preference to good old fashioned gas ones that they've done for years.

However neither of those kinds of battery timescales are going to help you keep the lights on at 12 midnight if the sun went down at 8pm and with it your PV renewable source of energy. To use the energy that can be harvested during sunlight hours you need to store it for a good few hours (no problem pretty much all batteries can store energy for days without self-discharge leaking it away) but more importantly you need to have the ability to deliver huge energies at significant rates for many hours after sundown. Flow batteries are clearly the way to get long duration batteries with sublinear cost (double the duration of energy storage yis just double the electr

Cripes that was quick. I only got back from switzerland 20 hours ago. Questions to myself and gambit.

dubmaskullanga - no he didn't mean that - nobody except those with a deathwish are suggesting draining and refilling with super-acidic electrolyte as a way to 'charge' the battery. Even if you wanted to take such risks the flow rate would be very limited and most definitely not 'instantaneous'

kevkan - I suspect that it could even be made quicker if it were not for the intrinsic capacitance of the large electrode plates involved. In going from charge to discharge all that needs to change is the thin layer of electrolyte right next to the electrodes.

I hinted at a property of VRFBs that is rarely exposed by the simple demonstration diagrams that you see - typically you see the electrolyte going into the stack on the left as being all 2+ and then emerging as all 3+ before going back to the electrolyte tanks and somehow not mixing with the pure 2+ that was originally in there.

This suggests that the power stack does 100% conversion of valence state of the electrolyte.

The reality is that the power stack, when in full operation, only does a few percent change of the average valence state of the Vanadium - thus if you were charging and putting in 100% pure 2+ the stuff you would get out the top would be maybe 95% 2+ and 5% 3+. This gets fed back into the electrolyte tank where in principles everything mixes and so in the tank it is now 99.8% 2+ and now a little bit of 3+ - after a significant time you convert a significant amount of the 2+ to 3+ and then after even more time eventually you have converted all the 2+ to 3+. At this point you should stop charging the battery as there's no more Vanadium to store the energy and instead you end up electrolysing the water and creating gas.

As a result the power stack contains both 2+ and 3+ ions pretty much all the time so you can operate a charge cycle 2+->3+ or very quickly just change the voltage on the electrodes and you then do discharge 3+ -> 2+ . You never need to change the direction of flow of the electrolyte and you can switch between charge and discharge very quickly. The reality ends up being even simpler than the simple explanation diagrams !

Can anyone wish to shed any light on these trades:

14:30:22 207,808 23.00
14:29:56 221,670 23.00

11:56:00 201,659 22.10
11:47:32 227,463 22.50

All appear to be sells and I will consider them as such unless anyone says otherwise.

cozza99 - thanks for that information - I'm guessing the 37,946 at 9:13am - i.e. just before the dropping of the 500K shares from the Wogen warrants block in I think.

Good job you were not a couple of minutes before 'the event' around 11:30 as you might have briefly convinced yourself that you were responsible for the sharp drop.

By 9.15 this morning there was an excess of around 420K buys over sells so this 500K sell looks perfectly sized to simply offset those buys with supply of shares from the pot of Wogen warrants exercised a few days ago.

There was no price movement at 9.15, everything was perfectly orderly.

What happened at 11.30 this morning was completely different and I shall be looking into it trade by trade later on so if anyone wishes to disclose any of the trades for this analysis you can either do this here or privately by emailing editorial @ thebushveldperspective . com

He mentioned that a Vanadium Redox Flow Battery can be charged instantaneously - this is not correct of course - the speed with which you can charge the battery is determined by the size of the membrane power stacks. The speed at which you can put energy into the battery is called the power rating and it is the thing with the MW units.

On the subject of the power stacks - two days ago whilst at the International Flow Battery Forum I described how Thyssen-Krupp (you know the huge german engineering company) are now making VRFB power stacks with a cross section of 2.5 square metres - that is about the same size as a one of those 8-by-4 sheets of plasterboard that you break in half when trying to get it out of your car. They use robots to assemble the stack, so good luck on finding someone in the UK to do that.

This way in a single shipping container they can cram 1MW of generating power - that is maybe 50-100 houses worth of power delivery capacity.

Anyway back to the point about how quickly you can 'charge' the VRFB - what VRFBs can do is change from charge to discharge very quickly - you don't need to wait for the liquid to change direction or anything like that, (in fact as I will explain at a later time the liquid only ever flows in one direction anyway ). In the presentations of commercial VRFB manufacturers UET were able to show data that showed that they could get sub-millisecond changes from 100% charging to 100% discharging in their VRFB's something that you might have only dreamed of for a battery the size of a power station.

Well done Cactusman, you are now well over the 1 million pounds worth of BMN shares level.

Had you been at the International Flow Battery Conference yesterday you would have seen and understood exactly why BMN is going to become hugely more successful. I will never see another opportunity like this one.

Now there is the prospect of dividends poking its head above the horizon that might not be a bad idea.

Ditto me, about 350K shares.

Before 1:30 I find approx 800K more buys than sells, plus another 110-120K since 1:30pm.

Those sitting on the sidelines waiting for the famous dips to buy on may be forced to conclude that they do not have much time left.

The chinese rebar regulations come online on the 1st of November. Steel mills will need to get their act together before then. V2O5 will need to be bought a couple of months before that point so that it can be turned into the chinese preferred V+N.

Panic buying of Vanadium for steel applications will set in once 100 USD/Kg V is reached - we are not far away now.

As explained 2 days ago, substitution with Niobium is something that takes years to do, and then you are in the position of relying upon a metal that is made by pretty much only one company, CBM in Brazil.

Tyfoon - it is a process of fractional distillation. Each down cycle distils off a fraction of weak holders so that each up cycle has stronger holders that can allow the SP to go higher.

Normally on AIM this ends up with PIs being give a rough ride and shed before the company becomes profitable. Fortunately those here understand that BMN is also superbly profitable now and possibly unimaginably profitable once Vanadium prices hit 100 USD/KgV which I believe will happen before the 1st Nov rebar date in china.

keep em coming - thanks very much