Transcript of MT presentation: (3 posts in total to fit message limit)
Thank you, JPMorgan, for hosting this event and thank you to all the talented staff at rho motion who have also put on a very valuable process. I promise, I can make you a promise, not to show you many graphs - maybe only one which is our share price. I'm also going to talk about - a retraction now- I like sodium, I like the niobium, I like all of the technologies we have heard about today. {They} are all, no doubt, valuable and are going through a growth process. The market is very big, and it's growing superfast but I’m here representing what used to be the dinosaur of industry, which is graphite. That's the thing you have heard everyone today say is no good; I’ll maybe point out some ways that it could be better than people think, if you do it in a modern way.
As the great Gordon Gekko once said from Wall Street: “Graphite is good”. I think that's what he said. That's the way I heard it anyway, for want of a better word: graphite is good.
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And so, we are an ASX listed our public company; I founded the company about 13 years now, and 12 years ago we looked at the lithium-ion battery supply chain and recognised that graphite was not really being done outside China. The supply chain was extremely fractured, and there was room for a new entrant to go somewhere else in the world outside of Asia and start producing our anode material from graphite. We found this wonderful deposit of very special graphite with very small flakes, which is unlike anything else in the usual lithium battery industry in that instead of big flakes, {and} making them smaller. We found a deposit with all little flakes that are already the {right} size for the battery. It's very, very high grade and so we started working on getting that out, and today we make anodes out of it for lithium-ion batteries - current technology and new technology materials as well. So, we are differentiated by {
being}:
- owning our own mines,
- owning our own process technology, and
- producing fully coated anode products, and also
- next-generation materials like silicon, which are mixed with graphite, and we’ve
- even done some work with solid-state materials which are mixed with graphite {and},
so we are also extremely sustainable, as I'll show you later on.
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Our locations Our corporate offices in Perth, Australia, but our operations are mostly in Europe. We have the mineral resources in the North of Sweden, and we have a technology centre in Cambridge, and we have our processing metallurgical facility in Germany, which is in the heart of a lot of battery developments in Europe. And we certainly see ourselves as customer focused.
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So rather than pushing technologies that we just like for the sake of it. We are very much integrated with what our customers want ie. what they want, not 100% higher energy density they may want 20% higher or 10% higher and it's all about cost. So we very, very practical in our outlook and very much the company is founded on making sure that we have the most innovative, but also most sustainable, products.
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This is what's happening in Europe at the moment: huge amount of battery makers many from, of course the Asia regions, which until now, were the only places really making a lot of batteries, and then of course it spread into North America and now spreading to Europe as well. Europe is actually growing very fast. You have 800 million people in this picture here, all buying EVs now like crazy and also looking for home storage and other ESS type solutions as well. So we are very well located.
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Fundamental to our decision to be in Sweden is the access to low-cost and green power. So 100% of our operations, {
they} are powered by hydro. They haven't had a power outage since 1979 - I believe {that] was the Iran oil crisis, something like that. Down south, they have a lot of wind, and also nuclear.
The other good thing about being in a location like Sweden is you can direct-drive your material to your customers in Europe, so if someone has a factory - they're making batteries in Germany - they don't have to wait for 30 days shipping, {or} having any problems along the way. We can drive within 24 to 48 hours. We can drive a truck, or a railcar, down to their facility and…
Because our ore is particularly high grade at the mine, we have extremely high amounts of anode we produce per ton. So its extremely efficient, and Hitachi’s life-cycle assessment shows emissions of CO2, that's about 20 times less than the material that is currently in your laptops and your phones in this room today - the way they have been made. This is very useful to a car manufacturer, because in this continued era of going towards Net Zero, the graphite represents, takes up, the volume of half the active materials in the battery. There’s about 10 times more graphite in a battery than there is lithium, actually, in volume terms. So if you can have really low CO2 graphite, that comes all the way through the supply chain of your EV, you end up with low CO2, it really helps your budget, to try keeping the drive towards net zero, so…
Having really high grade deposit, which has got very high efficiency and runs on green power and doesn't need shipping, leads you to probably, the lowest CO2 product of battery that you can land in the world that we are aware of.
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Now this, I will argue is sort of a roadmap rather than a chart so I’m trying to keep my promise, but this is just to show that our approach is to be vertically integrated to capture all the margins of the entire supply chain and increase control and security of it. On the left, we mine material, we also take materials from recycling - we have process technology for both of those, {and] we refine the graphite to over 99.95% battery type purity. We coat it, we shape it and its ready to go to a battery customer. Any material that comes out of that as a by-product, something that doesn't go into a battery, we actually turn into graphene which is ultra-thin graphite, the wonder material, but it certainly does do different things to graphite - if you make it the right way- and what we do is we mix it in with silicon to make silicon anodes for batteries and also conductive additives for cathodes and we also then make additives that can go into things like concrete and plastic. So again, it's all about resource efficiency and it's all about capturing all the margins, which is what you want to do in a modern business.
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Our leading coated graphite product is called Talnode®-C. It's quite a new and innovative form of graphite, which to some of you in this room might sound a bit silly: {viz,} that graphite is this dirty old stuff lying around, you buy cheaply from China or from Africa.
What we have done is taken a new approach. The last 40 years since lithium-ion batteries evolved, the form of the anode, being the graphite. It was sort of accidental how it was made and then refined. What we did, was strip the fundamentals back, and we make these ultrafine, smaller particles that are natural -so they have lower CO2- but we’re able to control the surface area, while having them as smaller particles, so we can get superfast charge rates 10C, we’ve had material do 20C successfully, and it's very, very good, actually at low temperatures.
So to get back to the fire situation, when it comes to lithium iron plating, a lot of problems around lithium-ion battery safety is often in cold temperatures, not hot, because the cold is when you get the lithium metal dendrites growing, - there's some information out there about that.
Its already in a qualification process with automotives, its already at a B stage with many large groups and C stage with others, so it's going into commercial contracts now.
And I’d just like to mention actually in our room today, our former chief scientist Dr Claudia Capiglia. I just wanted to say hi to Claudia because he was massive in helping advance this project from his experience, in Japan for over 20 years in the industry
This has been a champion product of his, as well as ours.
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On the silicon side, we like to keep a foot in the next generation products as well. So our team, the technology team, have come up with a 50% silicon product which is mixed with graphite and graphene. The roadmap we’re seeing coming from customers are that they don't necessarily want 5 times the energy density- because it's all about cost and it's about longevity- they just might want 20, 30, 40% more. So this product produces about 5 times more energy density than your battery today, but what they'll do is they’ll water it down.
So we will supply that powder and they'll dilute it and add it into their existing supply chains and dilute it down to what they want. So that seems to be where things are going.
Critically we use machinery that can scale up, so this is not small stuff. This is… we have to be in a position where in the future you doing hundreds of thousands to millions of tons of anode and we are doing that very, very successfully. We’ve just opened in a pilot plant in Germany, doing that as the next level of scale up and…
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We also are producing conductive additives for cathodes- which we haven't talked about much in the past but, you may not realise that about 3% of your cathode is carbon black or carbon nanotubes; and these are in there to help modify that the performance of the material. The problem is carbon nanotubes have got quite a high cost and they not that CO2 friendly (the way they made), likewise for carbon black, so we have come up with a new ultrafine version of graphite. This stuff is like sub 5µm, down around 2µm or smaller but specially shaped and designed so that it can replace carbon black or CNTs at a lower price and allow you to then stack more active material in so instead of 3% additive level, you’ll have 1% additive - the extra 2% room can now be active material that makes a car go longer or your phone last longer.
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Importantly for us what we're doing is really putting…. what is currently this very disparate supply chain around the world: where we've got mines in one continent, and shaping and purification downstream, processing in another continent , and another continent doing the coatings in the final product before it goes to the customer, which will often then ship those batteries back to the original place.
To us that's crazy. So, what we have done is: we do all the mining, we do all that process all the way through to the final product. So, when it comes to Europe, we can {
sort of} encapsulate that entire supply chain: very efficient, very safe, very controlled, very secure. It is not liable to the disruptions you get with world trade, as we’ve seen over the last couple of years; so that's another outstanding benefit.
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