QEM commissions vanadium pilot project and HPA extraction unit for battery sector supply

QEM Ltd successfully has commissioned a pilot plant to evaluate the production of oil shale and vanadium pentoxide with resources from its flagship in north-western Queensland, the Julia Creek Project. QEM is an Australian producer of vanadium pentoxide and energy.

The company is supposed to inspect the extraction process of high purity alumina (HPA), a critical metal used in the battery making industry. Luckily enough, the Julia Creek plant has abundant resources at its main working facility.

The provisional pilot plant has been installed at the Melbourne headquarters of the HRL Technology Group and will continue operating for six months until the commercial demonstration plant construction completes.

Gavin Loyden, the Managing Director of QEM, has declared that the pilot plant inauguration will look after the dormant price market that the company wishes to capture.

The resources at the Julia Creek Project will also come in handy for the company’s technological prowess.

Loyden quoted: “Crucially, the potential HPA upside recently identified will be incorporated into our original bench-scale test work programme schedule cost-effectively and without timing delays to the core of our programme.”

The material, vanadium pentoxide, is utilised in steelmaking and has credibility in energy-storing batteries, where it acts as an electrolyte. High purity alumina is another product essentially used by the battery manufacturing industry, and very few producers of high purity alumina can maintain the purity standards required for the industry.

Though the pilot plant is at its infant stage, the company hopes to yield materials useful to aid the battery industry.

The equipment mounted at the pilot plant was provided by an Indian specialist, AMAR, a continuous reactor maker. AMAR was founded in 1974, and over the past 45 years, they have acquired extensive knowledge and experience in the design, manufacture and supply of high-pressure, high-temperature batch, continuous reactors and allied systems. They custom make the machinery according to the order placed by any company.