King River Copper says its produced a vanadium pentoxide that’s now at 99.51 per cent.

King River — which was one of the best performing ASX small cap miners last year — operates a site in Western Australia that it says contains “one of the world’s largest titanium and vanadium in magnetite deposits”.

The explorer (ASX:KRC) revealed in late June that it could produce 99.47 per cent vanadium pentoxide (V2O5) from its Speewah project.

It’s been working to get that to between 99.5 and 99.9 per cent – which is higher purity and fetches a better price.

The stock put on 16 per cent to 11c in early Tuesday trade. It’s traded between 0.5c and 19c over the past year.

Their analyst TSW Analytical is investigating a new direct leaching-precipitation method to produce vanadium pentoxide powder, vanadium pentoxide flake, titanium dioxide, iron oxide hematite and vanadium electrolyte from the deposits at Speewah.

This process is different from conventional salt roast technology or solvent extraction methods.

The next steps in the study are to produce high-value standard grade vanadium pentoxide flake suitable for the steel industry.

They want to refine the high purity vanadium pentoxide powder process so it’s suitable for chemical and battery grade products.

And TSW will do more titanium dioxide testwork to improve recovery of King River’s high purity TiO2 and other TiO2 products.

King River has been a winner for investors since it started telling the market in February of its vanadium quality, rising 102 per cent in the last six months.

King River shares over the last six months.