While we wait on the YouTube version of the webinar, here is what
@Gvan wrote on HC. Thx GVan!!
For those that missed the live webinar and have to wait for the upload:
Highlights from the webinar, Mark confirmed that Talga was apart of the CRM financing subgroup meeting on the 10th of April:
“Yes, when I was over there. After the decision, our team was already heavily involved, but yes we were present at the subgroup meeting and have been a close part and have also had private meetings, of course. We’re deeply involved.”
“That’s under negotiation right now. We’ve been in meetings recently. We’ve expressed what we like and what we want. They are contemplating that, and we’re having meetings with them and there are different aspects, which range from outright grant funding, to co-funding the private equity, all the way through to building strategic stock-piles and getting involved in offtake type work. Those negations are underway and I must point out that for strategic projects, they are customised per project. There is no one size fits all, like everyone is going to get a pool of a part a billions of dollars, its actually customised.”
Mark on whether this CRMA financial support will align with Talga’s FID timeline:
“The timing is working out fine. By the time that’s done, you’ll have your full permitting on the mine site done and offtakes in place, it should all come together at the right time. Certainly, there’s a really strong interest, our project is one of the more advanced, dare I say, poster children of critical raw material projects in Europe. So, it’s looking good for us getting the sort of support we want.”
Mark dropped some breadcrumbs when talking about conference meetings. They’re chosen when the company can kill two birds with one stone (conference + potential customer meetings/networking):
Recently in a conference in Italy: “Well, we were meeting with, who was there? CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, Italian battery maker FAAM, ACC, Ferrari, Verkor, Li-VEco, customers, investment partners. That’s why we’re there. We usually have meetings with them there at their facilities or we’re visiting something….We don’t usually do something from a pure promote point of view, it’s usually carefully crafted by our comms team and for commercial purposes.”
Mark also went into detail about Northvolt’s difficulties, and quashed any concerns that Talga will face similar problems with Chinese equipment suppliers:
“No, it’s not a problem. We made an early decision to make anode differently. We wanted really high yields, our material is different and we’ve totally manufactured our downstream process around our mine. We haven’t just squeezed our mine into an existing Chinese process. So, therefore we actually don’t use Chinese equipment at all. Which means we don’t have Chinese software, we don’t have Chinese chips, in the same way that Northvolt did and became a bit of a problem in various ways. By the way, we’re not exposed to Northvolt. For many years we had relations, but were very careful about our situation there. Word on the grapevine, there will be someone taking over that plant
(Scania?) and that may be of great interest to us, who takes over that plant and when it goes back into production. No, it’s not a threat to us.
When we have some vehicle companies, and some defence related people come up and audit our place, they go through everything including mining equipment, lab equipment, who’s signing off on calibrating the scales in the lab etc. All has to be from other countries. We use a combination of European and some Asian/Japanese equipment that we developed our own processes for. These are propriety, some of our processes are patented. We use mostly equipment off the shelf, from other vendors used in different industries like food and the pharmaceutical industry... We use the highest quality machinery we get separately and we do not get it from standards Chinese vendors."
