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the end of life – whether purifying for re-use or recovering and reselling the vanadium for other applications – which requires unique expertise that could be shared by a vanadium miner and refiner [86]. This approach is being pursued by two major primary vanadium producers, Largo Incorporated and Bushveld Minerals, who have created subsidiaries Largo Clean Energy (which will sell VRFB systems, a result of Largo’s acquisition of VRFB company Vionx in late 2020 [87]) and Bushveld Energy (which will sell VRFB electrolyte [88]), respectively. A related method to prepare vanadium supply for future demand and therefore reduce price volatility and uncertainty to the buyer exists through hedging strategies such as futures contracts, which are agreements between suppliers and buyers to transact vanadium at a pre-determined price at some specified future time. Futures contracts are common in some commodity industries such as those for oil, precious metals (e.g., gold, silver, and platinum), agricultural products (e.g., corn), etc., and could potentially be employed in the vanadium industry. In fact, cobalt – a metal with a similar supply chain structure to that of vanadium, in many ways, as discussed previously – can now be bought and sold via a futures contract launched in late 2020 [89]. Even prior to this development (i.e., as of 2010), cobalt became one of only two “minor metals” (along with molybdenum) traded on the London Metal Exchange, the largest global market for a range of metals. The transparency of such a market can help stabilize the supply chain, and indeed the cobalt price volatility is more than 3× lower since 2010 than between 1970 and 2010 [41]. While more comprehensive economic analysis regarding the promise of these strategies for VRFB deployment is beyond the scope of this work, it should be explored by others with cross-disciplinary expertise. In addition to its volatility, the magnitude of vanadium prices is an issue. While efforts to expand and stabilize the supply chain may help reduce vanadium prices in the long-term, any near-term expansion of supply may only occur as a response to price increases (e.g., to offset the more expensive recovery of low-grade primary production). Thus, the prohibitive price of vanadium may remain a separate issue from the supply chain challenges discussed here. One method to reduce the burden of the vanadium price does exist via a new market of electrolyte leasing, where a third-party company leases the vanadium – usually in the form of VRFB electrolyte – to a battery vendor or end-user. This reduces the upfront capital cost of the battery while increasing long-term costs (i.e., a shift of capital expenses to operational expenses) by introducing some recurring fee [90,91], which is attractive as it lowers the cost and risk of the required upfront investment for VRFB customers. In some schemes, a portion of the financial burden of leasing is shifted from the 82PDF Image | Bringing Redox Flow Batteries to the Grid
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