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Planet-Profit Report, reporting on sustainable development in the Western United States.

Rare earth rising: Part 1

Vanadium’s potential
for energy storage is
helping to drive push for uranium mining’s return in Colorado

For the past 20 years, scientists have been researching its use in new-age batteries. But until recently, they’ve been plagued by the vanadium redox battery’s limited storage capacity and inability to operate effectively in any temperature extremes.

Along with other obstacles, the added expense of maintaining expensive cooling systems has rendered the battery infeasible outside the research lab. But new government-funded research surmounts some of those obstacles, and could trigger a game-changing renewable energy breakthrough.

The quandary?

Vanadium exists side by side with uranium, in the same controversial ore that has spawned so many blessings and curses around the world for the past 70 years, first in atomic bombs and next in nuclear energy reactors.  You can’t mine one without the other.

“That certainly would be ironic,” said Hilary White, executive director of the Telluride-based Sheep Mountain Alliance (www.sheepmountainalliance.org).

Sheep Mountain has three lawsuits pending against Energy Fuels Inc., a Canadian company with offices in Lakewood that has received state approval to open the Pinon Ridge Uranium Mill in Montrose County.

On its website (www.energyfuels.com), Energy Fuels refers to itself as “an advanced uranium and vanadium development company.”

The company has spent $11 million in the past two years developing its plan to process up to 500 tons of ore per day, producing 850,000 pounds of uranium oxide pellets, each one generating the same amount of electricity as 100 tons of coal.

If built, the projected $150 million Pinon Ridge plant would be the first such U.S. facility constructed since 1980, when the White Mesa Uranium Mill in Blanding, Utah, opened. White Mesa is currently the only active uranium mill in the country.

“Vanadium represents a significant part of what we will produce,” said Curtis Moore, director of communications and legal affairs for Energy Fuels.  “We expect vanadium to represent about 25 percent of our total revenue. “

At current commodity spot prices, uranium brings about $68 per pound, while vanadium brings $7 per pound.

The ore that will be processed at Pinon Ridge contains four to five times more vanadium than uranium, Moore said. “At this point we plan to sell it for its use as a steel alloy (its main use since the early 1900s). At the same time, we remain very interested in vanadium-lithium batteries and the vanadium redox battery, which may at some point provide large-scale, communitywide electrical storage.”

“I don’t know enough about the processing of vanadium to say much about it,” Smith said. “This is the first time it’s come up. I do know that Energy Fuels’ main goal is to get uranium out of the ore and use the vanadium as a side market.”

Breakthrough

For 20 years, vanadium redox batteries have been regarded as a promising large-scale energy storage device, hampered by its high cost and inability to work well in a wide range of temperatures.

Public officials in Telluride, for instance, toyed with the idea 10 years ago of using utility-scale vanadium redox batteries as a way to get the town’s electric power “renewable and totally off the grid,” Smith recalled.

The project was abandoned as “not economically feasible,” she said.

But earlier this year, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., published research on their experiments that increased the batteries’ energy storage capacity by 70 percent and expanded the temperature range in which they operate.

In a paper published by the journal Advanced Energy Materials, lead author and PNNL chemist Liyu Li wrote, “Our small adjustments greatly improve the vanadium redox battery. And with just a little more work, the battery could potentially increase the use of wind, solar and other renewable power sources across the electric grid.”

Perhaps the biggest criticism of solar and wind energies is that its power is unreliable because it is intermittent. A traditional power plant generates electricity in a reliable, consistent stream by controlling how much natural gas or coal is burned. With wind and solar, no reliable storage exists that can store the energy for use at times when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

The new research into vanadium redox batteries may change the equation. By tinkering with the electrolyte chemistry in the batteries, researchers were successful in getting them to work in both warmer and colder temperatures, between 23 and 122 degrees Fahrenheit. That breakthrough eliminates much of the need for costly cooling systems. The refurbished batteries also were able to maintain more than 85 percent of their efficiency for more than 20 days – more than enough time between bursts of sunshine and gusts of wind.

The new-energy financial news website EnergyBoom.com wrote about the research in March, with the headline “Is Vanadium ‘the Next Big Thing’ for Renewable Energy Storage?”

“Proponents of the metal vanadium believe it will improve the economics of wind and solar power enough to make them cost-competitive with fossil fuels,” the trade publication reported. “Batteries using vanadium have the right combination of scalability, power and discharge/recharge characteristics to store wind and solar power until it can used during peak demands when prices are highest.”

Vanadium also is being tested on a smaller scale for use in electric cars. President Obama pledged to put 1 million plug-in hybrid electric cars on the road by 2015, and has pushed a $2.4 billion grant program to develop next-generation batteries. Vanadium-lithium batteries have scored important successes in the lab, but more research is needed.

“We will not have electric cars without lithium and vanadium for batteries,” said Joe Martin, chairman of Cambridge House International, a Canadian company that conducts annual conferences for resource investors.

Martin also cited vanadium’s importance “in better and stronger metal alloys, as well as in larger next-generation batteries. Maximizing the existing electrical grid demands storage and more generating capacity, so critical materials include uranium (in reactors), lithium and vanadium (for storage).”