Tivan's Speewah to elevate Australia as key supplier of 'obscure' fluorine

➤ The addition of fluorine to the Australian government's critical minerals list in December 2023 highlights the obscure commodity's strategic significance.

➤ The development of Tivan's Speewah project will turn Australia from a bystander to a participant in the supply of fluorine to the surging semiconductor market.

➤ China is shifting from being the world's largest exporter to an importer of fluorspar, and its reserves are being depleted, driving prices to multiyear highs.

Tivan Ltd. Executive Chair Grant Wilson. Source: Tivan Ltd.

After delivering a prefeasibility study on the Speewah fluorite project in Western Australia in July, Tivan Ltd. expanded its team this month in a bid to capitalize on the surging demand for battery and semiconductor metals.

Fluorite, known commercially as fluorspar, is the principal source of fluorine, which has unique characteristics with applications in various industries.

S&P Global Commodity Insights interviewed Grant Wilson, the executive chair of Tivan, on the company's direction in light of the macro environment. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

S&P Global Commodity Insights: King River Resources Ltd. released a scoping study on Speewah as a vanadium-titanium-iron project in 2018. Now you're talking about fluorspar. What has happened?

Grant Wilson: The history of this company is pretty unusual. Tivan was actually called TNG Ltd. 18 months ago. I led a shareholder activism campaign and took control in December 2022, and five directors exited. We walked into their major project, Mount Peake in the Northern Territory, and it was a write-off. There were three months to either liquidate the company or do something else.

King River Resources wasn't really a development firm, so progress on Speewah had been limited. However, in the last five years, the fluorine price has practically doubled to record levels, driven by electric vehicle batteries and semiconductors. So, even if they wanted to, they wouldn't have been able to deliver the prefeasibility study we delivered, as the market dynamics have changed fundamentally in recent years.

The vanadium is on exploration leases. It's the largest reported vanadium in titanomagnetite resource in Australia and one of the largest globally. We spent most of last year advancing the vanadium project as we have this TIVAN+ technology in development with Australia's national science agency [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization]. It aims to break the hard rocks into vanadium, titanium and iron. We commenced on that development pathway, then there was this important moment for us in December 2023, which was Canberra, in their wisdom, putting fluorine on the critical minerals list.

People were upset about copper and nickel not being on the list, then there was us, as the only ones in the country with a fluorspar resource. So we pulled apart the data room King River Resources had left us, and we couldn't find a flaw. We knew it was a relatively low [capital expenditure] project, and that there would most likely be good demand for it in Asia. So we announced the pivot late January and six months later, we're here.

The [critical minerals] list is really important as it means we may be able to access the Critical Minerals Facility run by Export Finance Australia, the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility and, more recently, the International Partnerships in Critical Minerals grant. And because fluorine is so obscure, I am not sure we could have persuaded the market that it was a real project. So it really was that decision by Canberra that acted as the catalyst for what followed.

Fluorite specimens from diamond drill core of Tivan Ltd.'s Speewah fluorite resource in Western Australia. Source: Tivan Ltd.

So what's special about fluorine?

It's been around forever, used traditionally in things like refrigeration and aluminum fluxing, glass and optics. The most notorious use case was hydrofluorocarbons, which contributed to the hole in the ozone layer. Most recently, there have been serious concerns around PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances), sometimes called "the forever chemicals," which are particularly problematic in water streams. They are being phased out.

Away from these noxious use cases, fluorine has these incredible properties as it's the most electro-negative element on the periodic table. It is really good at attracting electrons from lithium, for example, and it also repels water. It has become fundamental to EV batteries, where it's in the separator, the cathode, the anode and the binder. You can't make EV batteries without fluorine, so the EV battery wave has driven demand for the past five years.

Another key use case is semiconductors. Our project will be the first Australian project to supply the global semiconductor industry. Up until now, Australia has not been a participant but a bystander. Semiconductor manufacturing requires great precision in etching and cleaning the wafer, where you need high-purity hydrofluoric acid. Again, you can't substitute away from this. With artificial intelligence and that wave, which is coming and/or is here, the demand for next-generation semiconductors and computer chips will be huge in Asia.

Where do you see the biggest demand?

Japan is fundamental for Tivan. We signed our strategic alliance in June with Sumitomo Corp. From this we have great visibility on offtake. Our deal reserves tonnage for Japan, then there is South Korea, China, Taiwan and India. Sumitomo is our distribution and marketing agent. We know where we are selling to and with whom. We are way down the track on that.

China has moved from the world's largest exporter of fluorspar to now the world's largest importer. They are facing reserve depletion dynamics and that is part of why the price keeps going up. They're having to import now at scale, including from Mongolia. There is no other resource like ours in Asia, being in a western bloc country. We've also got short shipping routes to Asia. There are a couple of resources that resemble Speewah in South Africa, but they're much farther away.

Securing supply for Japan was the basis on which we landed our agreement with Sumitomo. We are not sure that a major Japanese trading house has ever moved with an Australian company before a prefeasibility study. Sumitomo also included a reference to Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security (JOGMEC), which has only participated once before in Australian mineral resources with Lynas Rare Earths Ltd. at Mt Weld. We hope to be number two.

Speewah's capex is less than A$250 million, making it low in capital intensity and high in criticality. For most rare earth projects, you likely can't move for less than A$1.5 billion as the processing is so complex. Ours is a mining operation and physical processing flowsheet. We have a high-purity product of 97%, and we are only 100 kilometers from one of Australia's most northern ports.