Member Info for Alfacomp

It is known by the experts inside the industry that certain primary suppliers whose name might begin with the letter G have done exactly that during past Vanadium price shocks.

Scheduled to be producing 3GW of vrfb a by 2020

Pleased to see that the BE update states that the EIA will cover both the initial 200MWh capacity for the plant as well as allowing for future production expansion. 200MWh is only going to consume 1000 tonnes of Vanadium - Anthony price from Swanburton yesterday predicted that the potential worldwide demand for flow battery energy storage is 3-10 GWh next year - 200MWh is only 0.2GWh - Bushveld Energy should aim to capture 2-3 times this amount as soon as possible, or at least as quickly as Fortune can get the Vanadium mined.

Richken, whilst yesterday at the international flow battery conference was interesting due to the contribution of the VRFB manufacturers there were also a couple of higher level talks:

1) Hans B Puttgen - pointed out that although switzerland already produces zero power from fossil fuels (it is 55% Hydro, 45% Renewable and Nuclear) many people in switzerland are preoccupied with the idea of zero energy houses. How can this be a bad thing you might ask ?

The answer is that it is only halfway to solving the problem - a zero energy house can be made by putting lots of PV on the roof that creates energy in the summer which it feeds back to the grid, but then in the swiss winter this doesn't do much and instead the house needs to draw pretty much the standard amount of power back from the grid - thus the grid still needs to be able to have the capacity (the power stations and all the expensive transmission lines etc) to provide that power when the homeowner switches all their lights on on december the 24th. The answer of course is local energy storage, and he is arguing that swiss ambitions should be guided towards a zero power house - one that doesn't need to import or export any power to or from the grid.

An interesting grandee of the Energy world who clearly knows his stuff :- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRrNEaOb7lU

2) Noel McEvoy of the British Embassy in Berne who came to give us the standard marketing pitch for UK plc - how we have two companies RedT and Oxkem who are doing something connected with flow batteries and 5 universities who are also working in this space. To top it off he didn't see the irony in explaining to a flow battery community that the UK government had committed to spend 246 Million quid on a Faraday challenge for car energy storage, where flow battery technology is not relevant (except for maybe the static charging stations). Really pretty embarrassing to be a Brit after that. I suspect he will not be at the conference today so I will not have the chance to take him to task over any of this stuff - but it does make it clear that in the UK we need to pull our lobbying socks up and start getting the message out about static energy storage or else we are going to miss preparing for the 4th Industrial revolution whilst the UK civil service is in paroxysms over Brexit.

CG I think we were just chatting about how to improve Vanitec promotion of VRFB battery technology (VRFB is the term that Vanitec is going to solely use in future to describe VRFB's so we should try and stick to that not VRB's, V-Flow Batteries, Rainbow batteries or magic energy machines - it's baby steps at the start) and everyone else went off for lunch, so we just carried on and chatted over a standup buffet lunch. No appointment necessary - I didn't ask them whether they are happy but to be honest they seemed quite happy but with a big dose of wanting to get cracking thrown in.

Pdub - yep all the London city professionals are behind the curve on the Vanadium price, as is pretty much everyone else in the world. Nobody predicted it would be this fast or this hard, if they did then I hope that they bought BMN at 9p as they would have already more than doubled their money.

Had a great chat with Fortune and Mikhail at lunch today. You can see that they are keen to reveal the next stage of the story, but only at the appropriate time, though I expect no leftfield surprises as they always like to signal important stuff ahead of time in things like the annual report and production updates. FM is clearly of the opinion that the market likes to see constant positive delivery to a well established plan.

Pdub - at the start of this year Hallgarten predicted the price of Vanadium Pentoxide to hit 13.2 USD/lb by the end of this year, rising also into 2019 and hitting 18 USD/lb in 2020

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

They got the overall direction and rough size of the increase right but but not the huge speed.

NickD - I spoke to FM yesterday about the premium for Nitrovan of 5% and he agreed with me that there should be pressure for this to increase over time as pound for pound of steel strength Nitrovan is something like 30% more efficient per Kg of contained Vanadium. Nitrovan gives you more bang for your Vanadium.

He said that it was a longish process of educating the users how they can use Nitrovan instead of bog standard FeV.

Previously Terry Perles had gone into some length about how substitution of Vanadium by Niobium was not at all trivial.

1) You need a 1200 deg C reheat furnace (1050 is usual)
2) in subsequent rolling operations you need much higher forces to get the >50% reduction in bar cross section in order to get the crystal grains to elongate so that Niobium can do its work on the grain boundaries (Vanadium works in a completely different way.) This appears to be a pretty major and possibly prohibitively issue for most steel plants.

Most people who talk about Niobium substitution of Vanadium in steel bar applications have no idea about the reality of asking a steel plant to change its processes quite so significantly => substitution of Vanadium with Niobium is definitely non trivial and is a major change to everything - saving a few cents per Kg of steel is just not going to make it worthwhile - especially when you realise that 90% of the world's Niobium comes from a single supplier.

daitom - good enough to have Peter Fischer of the Pfinztal Fraunhofer institute have a hole cut in the roof and a large test battery from Thyssen-Krupp craned in. This is to run along the Fraunhofer ICT's own cells developed with Schmalz.

The Thyssen-Krupp large area cells are designed to get 1MW of generating power into a single 6m long shipping container. Say what you like about the Germans and the Chinese but once they set their mind to doing something they get it done.

By the way how is our government doing over there, anyone else decided to huff off today ?

Good for you Jonnymaz - one thing that you'll be able to benefit from is that should dividends be paid on BMN shares then they will be protected from higher-rate or additional rate tax:-

https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/stocks-and-shares-isas

VRB energy speaking now - in nort western China up to 40% of renewable energy is thrown away - a huge opportunity for flow battery energy storage. Only top level guidance starting last year but quickly replicated at all local territory level.

Swanburton suggests 3-10GW is possible Per year Now

Now making flow battery cells with cross sectional area of 2.5m2 video shown but is top secret so not allowed to reproduce

Second VRFB leasing company now public - to quote Mike Perry of United technologies research centre, the Vionx research partner -"if you are a Vionx customer and you go to them then they can arrange the electrolyte leasing solution for you"

Terry not on until tomorrow - too much here to go into right at the moment. From what I can see someone is obsessing there about the purported missing of a syntactic target date. They have absolutely no idea of what is really going on in this field. Don't even bother wasting time on such nonsense.

Daitom - MN is definitely going to be there, Terry Perles too but I didn't see FM at the Vanitec dinner last night so I wonder if he has already left for London.

Kevkan - whilst there was a little discussion about electrolyte standards it is not one of those subjects that can be dealt with at a single meeting and is really just the start of a long process of getting input from all electrolyte participants. Actually quite a lot of the meeting was taken up with seeing the initial results of Lifa communication's VRFB promotion strategy which looks well worked out, given the rather diverse nature of the Vanitec VRFB community. Had a very useful chat with Gabriella von Ilse from Lifa afterwards about future promotional activity in the VRFB/Energy storage space.

Wolfman - I recall it was both myself and Gambit that undertook that particularly selfless operation. Alas the IFBF/Vanitec is hosted out on the campus of EPFL so it is not exactly barland central. Still we had a very nice dinner hosted by Vanitec last night where there was a lot of useful networking going on.

Surprisingly little concern about Vanadium prices being expressed by VRFB manufacturers at yesterday's Vanitec meeting, though this was perhaps as a result of the meeting's chair John Hilbert being quite clear that future pricing coul not be discussed at the meeting due to antitrust regulations.

We'll see if there is much concern today at the International Flow Battery Forum.

One other useful number to consider is that according to Terry Perles of TTP squared the chinese stone coal deposits which are understood to constitute the upper end of the Vanadium cost curve are only really cost effective at Vanadium grades of 0.8% - remarkably this is actually a higher grade than quite a lot of the ore reserves at the currently producing primary mines, and A LOT higher than many of the primary exploration projects that are now jumping on the Vanadium bandwagon.

You might then ask why the people with such stone coal resources don't just mine the stuff for the Vanadium and forget about burning the coal (ok well you'd try and burn it if you could - but it is a lower value resource) - the answer of course is that getting the Vanadium out of the stone coal is a lot harder than getting it out of Vanadium-Titanate-Magnetite ore - for one you cannot simply use low magnetic field concentration to get rid of all the non magnetic stuff, leaving the V2O5 in the magnetic rock (eg Mokopane ore grade in magnetite is over 2%).

The final nail in the coffin is that the Chinese no longer wish to burn this kind of coal and pollute their air - thus we can expect that end of the supply curve to evolve out over time, to be replaced by dedicated primary mine production.

Tyfoon the context was that Terry Perles commented that in SA, following the taking out of c. 12,000 tpa from the Highveld plant, that Vanchem was sitting idle and that possibly there could be some production there if there was some way to figure out how to supply it with ore.

Hmm, I wonder what he could mean.