Ann: TNG signs strategic HoA with BBI Group, page-249

would tivan work on the other projects you mention? Technically, I'm sure it would. But there is more to a project than engineering excellence and technical innovation. Most of the lower grade or highly oxidised deposits fail the economic test at the front end. They just can't make a good concentrate, or if they can it is at very low recovery or enormous ore throughput plus poor mining strip ratios. From one or two cross sections and a couple of small scale lab tests, it is possible to write off many projects if the LT historical vanadium price is assumed. Cashflow kills or gives life. Huge capex and lumpy early year operational cashflows destroy the NPV - so the promoters overcome this by adding scale to their spreadsheets until the NPV turns. With scale comes increased capex, but eventually the operational cashflows accumulate to overcome the year zero CAPEX number. You beauty, a $2b propositon which is "really easy to finance" and is not without commodity price risk, or in the case of a new process, completion risk. We will leave sovereign/geopolitical risk out of it for now because what could possibly go wrong there? LOL. Sometimes we see a really big IRR for the latest and greatest project ever to have been conceived. Utter nonsense. An IRR of 40% simply means that the project has a zero NPV at a 40% discount rate. If a project has $1 of NPV at the proponent's required rate of return, it should be implemented.

Sadly vandium can't really be hedged and there are a number of other kids in the sandpit who don't like to play nice. I'm nearly 60 and have seen three or four vanadium upswings followed by busts. I've seen $15 pentoxide and $60 FeV before. I have also seen $1.20 pentoxide and that happened about 17 years ago. No primary vandium producer can survive for very long below $4/lb especially if they are up to pussy's bow in project or corporate finance. There are some pretty tough kids in titanium, too and they like to play rough. To be honest, if this provides any comfort, I don't understand the world we live in today. A company by the name of Tesla produces one or two products very poorly and a has a market capitalisation greater than Ford or GM. I'm told if I don't take up bitcoin or some other bloody thing, I will cease to exist as a consumer and the sun will go supernova. Gold hasn't dipped below $300 for more than a decade. "Disruption" by renewables will keep Lithium Vanadium Cobalt Graphite and Nickel at permanent highs. If you believe the metal prices for exotics will remain where they are today into perpetuity, then you must invest in those companies.

It's up to the individual investor to decide what project they want to back. If you like enormous NPV or IRR figures and believe that a new innovation in an obscure commodity with a multi billion dollar capex bill will fly, having accepted all of the possible downside risk, then go for it. It's not necessarily a better or worse decision than investing in a conventional technology on the same obscure commodity that has a fraction of the CAPEX but still satisfies the universal investment criteria of delivering a positive NPV at the required rate of return. $4 vanadium kills both alternatives.