Lava Blue receives $5.2 million from the Australian Government for refining critical minerals

Australia-based battery minerals producing company Lava Blue has been granted US$ 5.2 million under the Government’s Critical Minerals Accelerator Initiative to evolve techniques to refine critical minerals used in the lithium-ion battery supply chain. 

Michael McCann, the managing director of Lava Blue, declared that this grant would help suffice a US$ 12 million Queensland project over the next two and a half years.

McCann commented: “This grant will allow Lava Blue processes to be applied to the recovery of several valuable minerals from vanadium pentoxide processing waste, including high purity alumina and potentially magnesium and residual vanadium.

“The outcome will be to greatly improve the economics of vanadium recovery and provide new supplies of high-purity minerals into global battery supply chains.”

Under the Lava Blue Centre for Predictive Research into Specialty Materials (PRiSM), the company plans to escalate each process to inch up the recovery of high purity minerals at the Redlands Research Park in Brisbane.

An investment of US$ 10 million has been made to develop and conduct research on the production of high purity alumina used in the separator between battery anodes and cathodes, also the development of PriSM.  

McCann remarked: “Battery minerals are not industrial metals.

“The high degrees of processing control required for materials to feed into battery manufacturing is at a 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 future.”

Five billion tonnes of coal and 36 billion barrels of oil are what we consume now. But as envisioned by Lava Blue chairman, Sylvia Tulloch, battery minerals and energy metals accepted over the next two decades could replace the zeal of burning natural gases. 

To develop its battery minerals centre of excellence at PRiSM, Lava Blue works near Queensland Pacific Metals Ltd, Vecco Group, Clough Engineering, Stantec and the world’s leading researchers at QUT.