The miner, the poet and the accountant

It’s one thing to be motivated by money, another thing to be inspired by imagination. So, is QEM Limited managing director Gavin Loyden more an accountant or a poet? More Josh Frydenberg or Barry Humphries, more Cromwell or Shakespeare? QEM managing director Gavin Loyden. After all, the financier has enough experience dealing in the cold world of business to believe in the ‘black and white’, recognise the good and the bad, embrace the winning formula and shun the high risk. QEM has an energy and vanadium play just south-east of Julia Creek between Townsville and Mount Isa in North Queensland. Competitive advantage The model looks to build on natural geographic advantages of the lease. This includes savannah for solar and wind generation which would supply power for hydrogen electrolysis that will help process diesel from oil shale. On top of that, there is a vast vanadium resource. China, which accounts for around 56 percent of the world’s vanadium consumption, produced a billion tonnes of steel and imported vanadium for the first time last year said Mr Loyden. Related stories On top of this, vanadium-redox batteries are again in the spotlight as a storage for larger generators as more wind and solar farms come online. The company is moving into a pre-feasibility phase in coming weeks which will include a lab-scale piloting project that is expected to take four months to complete. In the early days, the potential of vanadium had Gavin Loyden fascinated, like a hungry lion eyeing an elephant. Was it too big and would they get hurt tackling it? Perhaps, but what a feast. A package of solutions The company hads committed to four tenements containing a shallow vanadium resource, he said. “So I started doing a bit of research and looking around to see what might be the next logical position for something like this, given that the discussion around the rebar strength changing in China (and) vanadium redox batteries were starting to be mentioned again,” Mr Loyden said. “I spent about 12 months researching most of Queensland. And I found this to be the best spot. And the tenement area was open at the time. It was a nice shallow area, close to infrastructure. “All of the things that you would look for when you're looking to establish a mine. Over and above what the resource might look like. “So what you're looking for is a combination of those factors, which might give you a viable project as you start to develop.” Mr Loyden said QEM now had one of the largest resources in the world with a 250 square kilometre exploration lease and the vanadium locked in the Toolebuc oil-shale formation running between 36 and 90 metres deep. Enter phase two which is the oil shale processing and he said the company had developed a standalone process whereby the raw oil will be hydrogenated to produce a diesel product. Otherwise market forces were combining to compliment a hybrid power project including wind and solar generation, which puts the ‘green’ in the company’s ‘green-hydrogen’ production label. Initial exploration has the oil resource on the lease at 783 million barrels said Mr Loyden. Together the vanadium, oil shale, hydrogen and renewable energy projects become a viable entity, he said. Critical mineral Vanadium is considered a critical mineral by both state and federal governments which reflects the fact there is none produced yet in Australia. That is in the face of a significant local steel industry and demand from strategic allies said Mr Loyden. “I think it's around about $29 billion worth of steel, 44 percent of all the steel consumed in Australia is Australian steel. It still employs almost a hundred thousand people in this country. “There's no commercial vanadium production in Australia at the moment. There's only a small amount in the US, and that's why it's got that critical minerals designation, because it's critical in aerospace, obviously in renewable batteries. But critical for aerospace, critical for building jets and rockets and so forth”. “To give you an idea of consumption in the steel industry, say a half a kilo of vanadium doubles the strength of a ton of steel. And as we're looking at higher and higher grades of steel and steel strength, more and more vanadium are required.” Land holders and the McKinlay Shire Council had been supportive of the project and were being updated as more information came to light, Mr Loyden said. QEM had a market cap of $24.5m and closed on the ASX yesterday (Monday 03/05/21) at 0.225AUD. So, accountant or poet? Perhaps you need both the imagination of a poet to meet the scope of such a proposition and an accountant’s hard head to bring it together.

The miner, the poet and the accountant

Industry Queensland

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