Rare earth rising: vanadium's potential for energy storage is helping to drive push for uranium mining's return in Montrose County.

• Author: Reuteman, Rob
• Position: PLANET-PROFIT REPORT

An obscure mineral with a long and colorful mining history in Colorado may be reemerging as an element critical to the widespread use of solar and wind power, [paragraph] At the same time, it introduces a bit of a quandary for environmentalists seeking a clean and renewable energy future, [paragraph] The substance is vanadium, long used as a metal alloy that improves the strength and elasticity of steel. Though Colorado once produced much of the world's vanadium, U.S. markets now import almost all of it from Africa.

For the past 20 years, scientists have been researching its use in new-age batteries. But until recently, they've been plagued by the vanadium redox battery's limited storage capacity and inability to operate effectively in any temperature extremes.

Along with other obstacles, the added expense of maintaining expensive cooling systems has rendered the battery in feasible outside the research lab. But new government-funded research surmounts some of those obstacles, and could trigger a game-changing renewable energy breakthrough.

The quandary?

Vanadium exists side by side with uranium, in the same controversial ore that has spawned so many blessings and curses around the world for the past 70 years, first in atomic bombs and next in nuclear energy reactors. You can't mine one without the other.

"That certainly would be ironic," said Hilary White, executive director of the Telluride-based Sheep Mountain Alliance (www.sheepmountainalliance.org).

Sheep Mountain has three lawsuits pending against Energy Fuels Inc., a Canadian company with offices in Lakewood that has received state approval to open the Pinon Ridge Uranium Mill in Montrose County.

On its website (www.energy fuels. com), Energy Fuels refers to itself as "an advanced uranium and vanadium development company."

The company has spent $11 million in the past two years developing its plan to process up to 500 tons of ore per day, producing 850,000 pounds of uranium oxide pellets, each one generating the same amount of electricity as 100 tons of coal.

If built, the projected $150 million Pinon Ridge plant would be the first such U.S. facility constructed since 1980, when the White Mesa Uranium Mill in Blanding, Utah, opened. White Mesa is currently the only active uranium mill in the country.

"Vanadium represents a significant part of what we will produce," said Curtis Moore, director of communications and legal affairs lor Energy Fuels. "We expect vanadium to represent about 25 percent of our total revenue."

At current commodity spot prices, uranium brings about S68 per pound, while vanadium brings $7 per pound.

The ore that will be processed at Pinon Ridge contains four to five times more vanadium than uranium, Moore said. "At this point we plan to sell it for its use as a steel alloy (its main use since the early 1900s). At the same time, we remain very interested in vanadium-lithium batteries and the vanadium redox battery, which may at some point provide large-scale, communitywide electrical storage."

"I don't know enough about the processing of vanadium to say much about it," White said. "This is the first time it's come up. I do know that Energy Fuels' main goal is to get...