Northern Territory Greenlights Major Australian Vanadium Project
The Northern Territory (NT) in Australia has signed a key project facilitation agreement with the Australian resource company TNG for a $850million mining resource project.
The Mount Peake Vanadium-Titanium-Iron Project, which will generate more than 17000 construction jobs, will be a state of the art metals processing facility located in the Alice Springs area of Northern Territory, Australia.
TNG’s Managing Director Paul Burton said the signing of the Project Facilitation Agreement with the NT Government marked another exciting milestone for the Mount Peake Project as it continued to advance towards development.
“The project has already been awarded Major Project Status in the Northern Territory, and this agreement is a further indication of the proactive and positive approach which the Northern Territory Government is adopting to help facilitate the development of this major new Australian resource project,” he said.
The $850m Mount Peake Iron-Vanadium-Titanium Project
First discovered in in 2008 when TNG outlined a magnetite-bearing gabbro containing high-grade vanadium, titanium and iron. The mineralisation commences at shallow depths making the deposit readily amenable to open pit mining.
The PFA covers plans to develop the TIVAN metals refinery.
TIVAN is a new process designed primarily for extracting vanadium, preferably as vanadium pentoxide, from a titano-magnetite ore body, (a geological igneous rock formation that contains significant quantities of iron, titanium and vanadium), and also for separating the titanium and iron preferably as ferric oxide and titanium dioxide,
It is a unique method of extracting vanadium, with the original method consisting of a salt-roasting energy intensive, pyro metallurgical process.
Vanadium?
Vanadium is described by TNG as “miracle metal”, used to impart strength, hardness and water resistance to steel, in the manufacture of titanium alloys used in jet engines, airframes and other high-end specialty materials, and in the chemical industry, notably in batteries, plastic, glass and pigments.
Steel accounts for over 85 percent of vanadium demand, with consumption predicted to increase at similar rates to the growth of the global steel industry – driven by the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy and growing per capita use and intensity of use of steel in the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China).
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