Vanadium is a critical contributor to many different clean energy applications. It is directly used in the most common titanium alloy, Ti-6Al-4V. However, over 80% of the vanadium produced is used in steel production as ferrovanadium master alloy. Vanadium is an essential component to the high-strength low alloy (HSLA) steels and many advanced high strength steels (AHSS) that are being employed for lightweighting vehicles. We propose a novel approach to extract vanadium from its oxide. This novel approach provides primary energy savings: it uses less energy to extract a ton of vanadium than the current process of aluminothermic reduction. Our approach will also have secondary energy contributions: reducing the cost of ferrovanadium while improving its purity will accelerate the adoption of the high-performance steels that require vanadium. Developed at MIT, Molten Oxide Electrolysis (MOE) has been demonstrated at the lab- scale for a number of metals including iron, nickel, chromium, titanium, and ferromanganese, and at industrial pilot-scale with ferromanganese. Analogous to the Hall-Héroult process for the production of molten aluminum, MOE enables high-throughput molten production of metals and alloys that are commonly made in solid form with more expensive and slower processes. MOE enables the direct processing of oxides, the most common feedstock form of these metals. In Phase I, we will perform a detailed modeling investigation of the production of pure vanadium and ferrovanadium by MOE, determine the necessary adaptations to our pilot reactor, and perform a validation experiment in that pilot-scale reactor. In Phase II, we will refine the process, focusing on energy efficiency, vanadium recovery, and chemical purity of the product.
