The South Korean company is weighing a $10B plan to use new facilities to boost its battery cell manufacturing capacity to about 100 GWh by 2025, a move that would challenge sector leaders including Tesla.
Vanadium prices more than doubled in 2018, reaching historic peaks.
The need for nickel is starting to rise at a time when its price is too low to incentivize new project development.
The Aussie miner says new work in recent months has uncovered fresh targets assaying up to 2.3% cobalt and 32 grams per tonne gold.
Research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) projected that tin could be the metal with the most to gain.
Foreign platinum and diamond miners have been restricted to only 49 percent ownership of their Zimbabwe operations by the black economic empowerment law.
Zimbabwe holds the world’s second-largest known reserves of platinum-group metals after South Africa, plus substantial deposits of gold, diamonds, lithium, iron ore, coal, chrome and nickel.
Adding to the allure was a widely-held view that cobalt supply is constrained.
The mine is slated to produce 120,000 tonnes of high-grade copper annually.
Quantum Minerals is currently amid phase one of a two phase drill program at Irgon designed to confirm and expand the project’s historical resource that Lithium Corporation of Canada tabled in 1956.