Matt Rhoades, president and CEO of United Battery Metals (UBM), said that vanadium (Vanadium) will become a new generation of large-scale battery metal raw materials. At present, its company has detected vanadium deposits at its Wray Mesa project in Colorado, with reserves of approximately 2.7 million pounds.
Today, a large number of vanadium ore is found in the United States, while lithium ore is very scarce. In the face of a market value of 13 billion energy storage, vanadium will play an important role. Last year, vanadium was the best-performing battery metal material, and its performance even surpassed lithium and cobalt.
However, vanadium still has a long way to go to enter the future energy storage market and occupy a dominant position. There have also been unexpected situations this year. In the past few years, ferro vanadium prices have surged 33%. Only one month ago, the price of ferrovanadium was only $ 79 / g, and today it is as high as $ 105 / g.
In addition, vanadium pentoxide has also become the main material of power grid energy storage equipment-all vanadium redox flow batteries.
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Why does vanadium change the battery landscape?
When it comes to energy storage batteries, the bigger the mention, the better the performance, and the large size is the future development trend. This is because the liquid (electrolyte) of the vanadium flow batteries can use the current to transfer the charge from one battery tank to another battery tank, and realize the repeated transmission in the same system to form a closed loop. Can realize charging and discharging at the same time.
The performance of vanadium is better than lithium, not only in its long service life, but also in its three aspects: non-flammable, non-explosive and non-toxic. The expansion cost of this type of battery is lower. The larger the capacity, the cheaper the cost, which is the opposite of the lithium ion battery expansion.
Taking lithium-ion batteries as an example, although the capacity can also be expanded, if the size is doubled, the cost will also be doubled. However, the vanadium flow battery is completely different. The larger the capacity of the battery tank, the greater the cost drop.
At present, the vanadium battery has been expanded to provide power for the entire energy storage system at a cost of about $ 500 / kWh. In less than a year, the cost will drop to $ 300 / kWh. By 2020, its cost may be reduced to $ 150 / kWh.
However, the lithium-ion battery super factory cannot achieve such a rapid cost reduction.