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the price paid for shares this morning has risen from 19.35p to 19.85p in short order

this continued news of Vanadium prices rising is starting to have some impact on the market now.

Perhaps they will start to factor in all the other major developments since the end of 2018 also :- can someone remind me what these were

ohh jeez it is going to be another one of those days with hundreds of trades to analyse

I think you mean next week and year

Excellent to see setcentric.

exactly Jamiejojo - it is like a bank vault for containing precious metals except the people running the bank pay you for the privilege of being able to use your metal whilst it is contained.

another 0.5% today to 20277 USD/Tonne

that is up more than 7% since the start of the month

bassguy because nobody can predict the future it is not possible to say with any certainty whether you can make more money by selling Vanadium just for steel strengthening or for a combination of steel strengthening and VRFB manufacturing and V electrolyte leasing.

What CAN be said with certainty is that if someone such as Bushveld Minerals had not introduced a way to stabilise the Vanadium prices that the VRFB market is exposed to then that market would always struggle to become established.

Thus Fortune has decided that it is better to stimulate a potentially huge new market for Vanadium whilst establishing a foothold further down the value chain so that value can be extracted at multiple points, thereby turning BMN from a pure play commodity supplier into a renewable energy disruptor.

no GLR you cannot hedge Vanadium prices as there is no futures market - furthermore the whole point of long term agreements with VRFB manufacturers and financing partners to sustain the electrolyte leasing model is that it eliminates the issue of the current Vanadium price.

The only way that the current Vanadium price affects anything is for our existing steel customers, who we continue to serve, who have to pay us more money - this is precisely why we are expanding production, so that we can keep those people served whilst building the VRFB sector.

exactly - it costs us not a cent more to mine and process the stuff when FeV prices are $140 as when they are $14

So when Vanadium prices do rise up above $70 again all that will happen is that there will be an even longer queue of VRFB manufacturers waiting to join up for joint Vanadium or electrolyte leasing agreements.

Some may manage to get through the door and some may not. We may buy stakes in one or two more VRFB manufacturers, but there is absolutely no requirement on us to be obliged to force high Vanadium prices on those that we have agreed long term leasing agreements with. We can continue to sell the thousands of tonnes of Nitrovan that we currently sell into the steel industry whilst happily accepting the extra premium that those customers are being required to pay.

It is precisely this built-in hedge that we have that gives us the power and flexibility to help grow the global VRFB Energy Storage industry.

Madasahat - can you explain why ?

A further 2088 MW of South African Energy Storage are already planned for the next decade on top of the 360 MW (1440 MWh) of the Eskom BESS tenders that are currently being assessed.

Given that the Eskom BESS projects are at a duration of 4 hours it seems highly likely that this 2088MW will equate to at least 8,352 MWh of Energy Storage or an average of over 800MWh per year, for the next 10 years, just in SA.

Power Generation is not the same as Energy Storage bassguy

Electrolyte leasing of course makes the short-term cost of Vanadium irrelevant.

I guess it is a good thing that we are leading the field in introducing this model, eh ?

ahh yes Energy Storage from 14:40 onwards

sorry but what has a video about gold and bitcoin got to do with BMN apart from the fact that we don't mine gold and do not need some crypto scheme to base our business upon.

the best chart of vanadium price is here:- https://www.vanadiumprice.com/

Look at the chinese FerroVanadium prices on the scale starting at 1980 and you will see three important things

1) the three spikes since 2000 that have repeatedly led to existential crisis for two generations of VRFB manufacturers, the last of which gave us the profit and forced Cellcube/Enerox and Redt/Avalon into such straights as to allow us to take stakes in their businesses

2) The three baseline prices of c. $10/Kg FeV pre-2000, then a $15 minimum in 2016 and then a c. $30 minimum in 2020 - clearly something has changed since 2000

3) the slow growth of the Vanadium price after the mid 2017 announcement of further improved Chinese rebar regulations - unlike the very fast rises following similar announcements in 2005 and 2008 - this is partly because the chinese miraculously 'found' 10,000 tonnes of Vanadium in Sept/Oct 2017 which helped to keep back the speculative price spike for a couple of extra months then. However the feature is much wider than before, and as described in 2 the minimum after this spike is much higher than the $15/KgV observed in 2016 - this is because global stockpiles have been completely exhausted after a 10 year surplus from 2006 and the chinese are now roughly nett neutral on V rather than being strong exporters as they were for most of the 2000-2019 period.

If you want to understand how different Vanadium commodities are priced you need to read and understand this:- https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/vanadium-prices

I'm not sure Largo is overpriced - it does seem to be listed in markets that have a better understanding of mining operations.

As we are aware their vertical integration model is not a bad idea, it is just that they are a couple of years behind us, and operating in a territory that appears to think that it does not need electrical energy storage, unlike South Africa and Eskom who are only too aware of that fact.

Interesting to see that they are looking to diversify with a titanium dioxide extraction line on the non magnetic tailings - we of course have our magnetic tailings at Vanchem being used for leach extraction of further vanadium, and our subsidiary Ivanti now owns the rights to all the profits from this (after a 12 month period where 50% went to VVP).

Well it was Henry Ford who first discovered this remarkable property of Vanadium on the model T

https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a3658/4284734/