How vanadium is made
Most of it is never mined for its own sake. About 90% is recovered from the slag left over from making steel.
- stations
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- things upstream
- 25
- raw sources
- 14
- steps from the ground
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The short version
Steel slag supplies most of the world's vanadium, with the metal first arriving in vanadium-bearing magnetite ore. Roasting the slag or ore with a sodium salt makes a compound that dissolves in hot water. Acid drops it out as a red cake, which is fused into oxide and reduced with aluminum to make ferrovanadium for tool steels.
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Smelt the magnetite
Titaniferous magnetite is reduced with coal to make iron. Most of the vanadium in the ore goes into the slag, which can hold up to 25% of the metal and is kept for the next step.
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Roast with soda ash
Crushed slag or ore is mixed with a sodium salt and roasted at about 850 °C. The vanadium turns into sodium metavanadate, a compound that water can dissolve.
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Leach in hot water
Hot water washes the soluble metavanadate out of the roasted solids, leaving most of the waste behind as a residue.
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Drop out the red cake
Sulfuric acid is added to the solution until the metal falls out as sodium hexavanadate, a solid known as red cake.
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Fuse into pentoxide
Red cake is heated and fused into technical-grade vanadium pentoxide. Some of this oxide goes straight to sulfuric acid plants as catalyst, but most is headed for steel.
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Reduce with aluminum
Aluminum strips the oxygen from the pentoxide in the presence of iron, giving ferrovanadium. The most common grade holds 80% of the metal. Some plants use ferrosilicon and an electric arc furnace at 1,850 °C instead.
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Worth repeating
- The first large-scale industrial use of vanadium was in the steel chassis of the Ford Model T.
- The discoverer of vanadium, Andrés Manuel del Río, was talked out of his 1801 finding and told it was just chromium.
- Less than 0.2 percent vanadium in structural steel is enough to improve its toughness, ductility and strength.
Back to the ground
Follow every input upstream and vanadium starts as these 14 raw sources.
Everything it is made of See it on the map
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Where it comes from
- China70% of world output
2022 production of about 100,000 tons, as quoted on Wikipedia. China, South Africa and Russia together made more than 96%.
Where it goes next
Vanadium feeds 1 line directly.
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Sources
Cite this page: "How vanadium is made." Assembly Line, 2026-11-03. https://assemblyline.org/make/vanadium