”Why is 85-88% of vandium currently extracted from magnetite?” /...

”Why is 85-88% of vandium currently extracted from magnetite?” / growler1969​

Vanadium is bonded with magnetic metals, such as iron and titanium, and commonly occur as thinly layered deposits. Magnetite-hosted vanadium deposits are well suited for the steel market, where vanadium is produced into ferrovanadium, the form in which steel producers buy vanadium in order to combine it with steel to make high-strength metal alloys. Since high-purity V2O5 is essential in producing the clean electrolyte (99.5%) needed in VRBs, magnetite-hosted vanadium deposits are not well suited for VRB applications. This is because they contain impurities not found in sediment-hosted deposits and the impurities, which must be removed, are costly to extract.

Sediment-hosted (Shale-hosted) vanadium deposits is a rare type of deposit as no magnetic metals are associated and this makes it ideally suited to produce high-purity vanadium pentoxide (V2O5), which is a key precursor material required to produce the liquid electrolyte that powers a vanadium redox battery (VRB).

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