Cost Analysis of the Recent Projects for Overseas Vanadium Metallurgical Processing Plants

This study addressed the cost structure of metallurgical plants for vanadium recovery or production, which were previously planned or implemented. Vanadium metallurgy consists of several sub-processes such as such as pretreatment, roasting, leaching, precipitation, and filtration, in order to finally produce vanadium pentoxide. Here, lots of costs should be spent for such plants, in which these costs are largely divided into CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) and OPEX (Operational Expenditure). As a result, the capacities (feed input rates) and vanadium contents are various along the target projects for this study. However, final production rates and grades of vanadium pentoxide showed relatively small differences. In addition, a noticeable correlation is found between capacities and specific operating costs, in that a steadily decreasing trend is described with a non-linear curve with around ‑0.3 power. Therefore, for the plant capacity below 100,000 tons per year, the specific operating cost rapidly decreases as the capacity increases, whereas the cost remains relatively stable in the range of 0.6 to 1.2 million tons per year of the capacity. From a technical perspective, effective optimization of the metallurgical process plant can be achieved by improving vanadium recovery rate in the pre-treatment and/or roasting-leaching processes. Finally, the results of this study should be updated through future research with on-going field verification and further detailed cost analysis.