A Vancouver junior miner that is developing a vanadium mine in Nevada has inked an agreement with a German company that it hopes will give it a stake in the rapidly growing mass-storage battery market.
American Vanadium (TSX-V:AVC) and Gildemeister announced in New York this morning that the companies have signed a memorandum of understanding to explore a partnership that will see the mining company supply Gildemeister with vanadium for its mass storage battery systems.
American Vanadium, in turn, hopes to become a player in the manufacturing and marketing of vanadium redox flow batteries – considered by some experts to be the best solution for large-scale energy storage for backup power and for energy storage for renewable energy, such as wind and solar.
American Vanadium, headquartered in Vancouver, chose New York to make the announcement because, as the home to the world’s oldest and largest electrical grid, it will require massive investments over the next few decades.
“New York has made a concerted effort in the last years to become the centre of clean tech renewable investment, and superstorm Sandy put that into overdrive,” American Vanadium CEO Bill Radvak told Business in Vancouver.
“We believe New York to be likely the best customer. They’re working hard to build industry, so it may be the home for (battery) manufacturing.”
Vanadium is a metal used as an alloy to strengthen steel. It is also used as an electrolyte in flow batteries.
Radvak said that flow batteries’ main advantage over other types of mass-storage batteries – such as lead-acid or lithium-ion – is that they can be scaled to very large capacities simply by increasing the size of their storage tanks. They also have life cycles of about 20 years and can be completely discharged without reducing their life expectancy.
Once in production, American Vanadium’s Gibellini mine project in Nevada would be the only primary vanadium mine in North America.
The project, which is still in the permitting stage, would be powered by wind and solar power, using Gildemeister’s CellCube vanadium flow batteries for storage.
See next week’s issue of Business in Vancouver about American Vanadium’s plans to position itself as one of the greenest mining projects in North America.
