BBI, a majority-owned subsidiary of the Todd Corporation from New Zealand, owns the BBVTI project on the Pilbara coast in Western Australia.

TNG has the Mount Peake vanadium-titanium-iron project located 235km northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

TIVAN is a process designed for the hydro-metallurgical extraction of vanadium, preferably as vanadium pentoxide, from a titano-magnetite ore body. It can also separate the titanium and iron, ideally as ferric oxide and titanium dioxide.

The process, designed with German company SMS Group, Perth-based metallurgical consultants METS and the CSIRO, has undergone six years of development, including several successful pilot plant test stages.

The conventional way of extracting vanadium from titano-magentite ores is through an energy intensive salt roasting process that is suitable for only a narrow range of selected ore compositions. A water leach then has to be applied to recover a water soluble vanadium compound.

TNG managing director Paul Burton said as part of the arrangement the use of TIVAN would be explored for use on the Balla Balla vanadium project.

"The Balla Balla deposit is another exceptional world class vanadium resource and our initial testwork has shown the TIVAN process- is ideally suited to processing its material," he said.

"We are very much looking forward to working with BBI at an exciting time in the global vanadium and strategic metals markets where conventional sources of demand are being supplemented by demand from the emerging lithium-ion battery sector and renewable energy markets."