Sonia Madigan:
Graham Arvidson is from Australian Vanadium (AVL) and he has just stepped off the presentation stage here at Kalgoorlie Diggers & Dealers 2023.
Graham, what was your message to investors, brokers and the other companies here today?
Graham Arvidson:
Thanks.
The key message here is we intend to be Australia’s next Vanadium producer and what
that means is there are only three primary producers in the world.
We intend to be the fourth, and I guess there’s a bunch of wind in our sales.
Most recently, we were awarded a $49 million federal grant.
We started to receive the first payments from that grant and it’s really putting wind in our sails to carry the project forward and get into construction.
We continue to work on all the things we need to be fully ready, permitting, front-end engineering, doing all the things that will get us, and ideally commence construction in 2024, and get into production in 2025.
Sonia Madigan:
Now $49 million is a fairly sizeable government grant.
How were you awarded that much?
Graham Arvidson:
Well, it’s a wonderful award, right, but these things take years sometimes.
So over two years ago, we started a process with the government.
It’s called a collaboration grant, so there are benefits, the way our project is structured that we can unlock regional opportunities by collaborating with partners.
So the process starts like that, you apply and you work and you partner with the government, and that culminated in June this year with signing a binding agreement
and first payments commencing on the grant.
So we’re really fortunate, we’re really grateful to the government, for giving us an opportunity to be successful, getting behind this tier-one asset to be a vertically integrated vanadium story.
It’s wonderful.
Sonia Madigan:
Now you’re working near Meekatharra in Western Australia.
What sort of resource do you actually have?
Graham Arvidson:
Yeah, I mean, this is what underpins our asset, ultimately is great geology, right?
So we have an initial 25-year mine life, which is a wonderful platform to start off from.
And the reason we’re going to be a low-cost producer is simply because we have a wonderful deposit.
It’s a very thick, high-grade vanadium seam, it’s a magnetite and it goes across many kilometres, very consistently across the 25 years.
So we’re able to produce a concentrate at the mine that will underpin the downstream processing we want to do and provide that really consistent high-quality concentrate to then convert into the products that will support steel batteries and critical metals.
Sonia Madigan:
Now you’re here at Diggers & Dealers, what kind of reaction are you receiving from everyone who’s here?
Graham Arvidson:
I think it’s wonderful, I mean even a year ago we sometimes struggled to find people who could spell vanadium and there’s a growing consensus that honestly these vanadium batteries that going to drive this big change.
They’ve been around for decades and only now in this 4, 6, 8 and 12-hour storage solution that’s really really required to move to these 2050 targets, It’s coming into the fore a proven technology.
And the market right now has gone from, in 2019 one per cent of the market was batteries, by the end of the decade it’ll be 50 per cent of the market, so we’re in this really wonderful hockey stick moment and we’re excited to be at the heart of it with this great asset we have here.