Queensland battery minerals company Lava Blue Ltd has received a Federal Government Critical Minerals Accelerator Initiative (CMAI) grant, which will enable it produce high purity alumina (HPA) and other co-products from the vanadium rich Toolebuc formation of North Queensland and produce battery grade materials.
The CMAI grant is a $5.27 million cash grant, matched dollar for dollar by Lava Blue, with in-kind contributions from Lava Blue, QUT and mineral development partners such as Queensland Pacific Minerals Ltd and the Vecco Group. The total project value will be in excess of $15 million by 2025.
Mr McCann said Australia was clearly moving beyond the ‘quarry’ model of resources, and into an employment-creating value-add model where on-shore processing of battery minerals will capture long term benefits for Australia.
“The value of a critical mineral processed into a battery material could be 10 or 20-times the value of the same mineral dug out of the ground and shipped to an overseas processor,” said Mr McCann. “We have the engineers and the scientists to develop a battery materials industry from our excellent resources industry, and I am very pleased to see Australian governments so actively supporting the Australian resources industry moving up the value chain.”
Lava Blue is developing novel processes for extracting and refining critical minerals used in the lithium-ion and flow battery supply chains. One of its projects is the scaling-up of processes for recovery of high-purity minerals at the Centre for Predictive Research into Specialty Materials (PRiSM), which will open in March 2023 at the Redlands Research Park in the southeast of Brisbane.
Lava Blue has already invested nearly $10 million dollars in research and development into production of high purity alumina (HPA) from unconventional sources. HPA is a specialty material used in the separator between battery anode and cathode. Lava Blue is working with collaborators on commercialising its process and to value-add to the HPA by manufacturing ceramic coated separators for batteries.
Beyond the production of HPA Mr McCann said Lava Blue was working with a team of scientists and engineers at Queensland University of Technology to perfect processes that will unlock a number of Australian resources for the battery supply chain.
“We’re working on processes to be applied to recovery of a number of valuable minerals from vanadium processing waste, including HPA and potentially magnesium, rare earths and residual vanadium,” said Mr McCann. “The outcome will be to greatly improve the economics of vanadium recovery and provide new supplies of high-purity minerals into global supply chains.
“Battery minerals are not industrial metals,” he said. “The degree of processing control required for materials to feed into battery manufacturing are at a totally different level to normal mineral processing. However, Australia is rapidly developing the capacity to produce battery materials and help drive the massive historical transition to a carbon-constrained, renewable energy and deep storage future.
“Australia already produces more than half the world’s lithium. We could certainly have just as dominant a role in the production of other critical minerals including high purity alumina. We are pleased to say that the Federal Government agrees.”
