Short answers, pulled from the story.
Andrés Manuel del Río first identified vanadium in 1801 while extracting it from a brown lead ore found in Mexico. He initially named the substance panchromium and later erythronium before retracting his claim under pressure from a French chemist. The element was rediscovered in 1830 by Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström who named it vanadium after the Norse goddess Freyja.
Henry Enfield Roscoe successfully produced pure vanadium metal in 1867 by reducing vanadium chloride with hydrogen. Early attempts by Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1831 yielded only vanadium nitride rather than the metal itself. This successful isolation paved the way for the industrial application of the element.
China, South Africa, and eastern Russia mined more than 96 percent of the 100,000 tons produced in 2022. China alone provided 70 percent of the global supply of the element. The production of vanadium has shifted from dedicated mines to slag from steel smelters and uranium processing facilities.
The vanadium redox battery utilizes the different oxidation states of vanadium to store and release energy. Vanadium exists in four adjacent oxidation states ranging from plus two to plus five, each displaying a distinct color in aqueous solution. This electrochemical cell has been commercially developed since the 1980s to handle the intermittency of renewable energy sources.
Approximately 85 percent of all produced vanadium is used to create ferrovanadium alloys for construction, automotive, and aerospace applications. Vanadium steel was instrumental in the development of high-speed tool steels which achieve hardness levels above HRC 60. The element is also a key component in titanium alloys used in jet engines and high-speed airframes.