We will generally Renascor Resources Limited. I am at a late time, we'll pass. For those who do not know me, my name is Dick Keever, so my mother did call me Richard, but I'll be the Chairman this morning. I ask everyone with a mobile phone to make sure that it's turned off during the meeting, if we can all do that, please. Welcome, any shareholders who are watching today's AGM live webcast. If you are attending the meeting in person in Adelaide and wish to ask a question, please raise your hand at the appropriate time. I will allow time for discussion for each item of business when we get to that. First of all, may I introduce the team here this morning? On my left-hand side, he's normally my right-hand man, but Managing Director, David Christensen. I'll keep going on the left until I'm gone.
This is our CFO and Company Secretary, who'll be counting all the votes. I know that you won't be counting the votes personally because you'll be supervising for all the day. Katherine Presser is one of our Non-Executive Directors. On my right-hand side, we have Jeff McConachy and Stephen Whistle, who are my Executive Directors. If you're a shareholder entitled to vote at today's meeting, you should have received an attendee card when you came in this morning. If you've not received the card and believe you're entitled to vote, then please raise your hand. Is everyone comfortable being ready? Thank you. The poll will be conducted on all items of business to be considered, and your card will be used for the voting. It is important to have that.
One of all, each shareholder, whether voting in person, by proxy, or by representative, is entitled to one vote for every share held by that member. Where a proxy vote has been given to the Chairman, without voting instructions, I intend to vote in favor of the resolutions as they come up. Details of votes received by proxy for each resolution, detailed in the notice of the meeting, will be displayed on the screen at the time that we propose the proposed resolutions. The minutes of the previous annual general meeting, members of Renascor Resources Limited, held on November 26, 2024, were approved by the board and signed by me in accordance with the provisions of Section 251A of the Corporations Act. These minutes are tabled and are available [ for any members to view.]
I declare that the quorum is present and advise that the notice of annual general meeting was made available to all shareholders on the October 24th, 2025. Accordingly, I declare this meeting properly constituted and open. There are no apologies. The next section, I propose to read out my chairman's address, and it might be a bit impersonal and boring to read it out, but it's required that this be lodged as such as changes have been done, and therefore I'm supposed to be perfect in what I say here. " Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our 2025 annual general meeting. It is now 10 years since our company began the process of transformation into primarily a graphite and graphite products company.
The aim of serious participation in this current and extraordinary worldwide energy transition, first by mining graphite on the Eyre Peninsula near the coast, about 110 km north of Port Lincoln, then producing a high-tech purified spherical graphite, often known as PSG, right here in Adelaide, to be marketed overseas. While small amounts of PSG are used in Australia, by far the most is used overseas in the manufacture of the modern lithium-ion batteries, or LIBs, as they're sometimes known. Most of us have an LIB in our pocket or on our wrist right now, and some of us probably drove an EV car to this meeting, powered by a lithium-ion battery and charged by the grid. Renascor was an early mover into graphite when our company took on the task of systematic exploration and staged acquisition of what became the Siviour Graphite Deposit.
Immediately after a breakthrough discovery by a private company, Earth Peninsula Minerals Limited, where graphite was not known to occur before, it was a new discovery in that regard. It is a high-risk venture which, owing to the skills of our people, became the basis of proving a major high-quality graphite deposit, with ample graphite ore within the reach of shallow open-pit mining sufficient for a long-time mine life of several decades. Our graphite can be beneficiated to be sold as graphite flake with a grade of about 95% carbon. Graphite, of course, is 100% carbon. Or manufactured into PSG using our outstanding environmentally friendly purification process to produce battery grade, which is greater than 99.95% carbon.
To get where we are now, of course, Renascor was required to complete several major exploration drilling programs, primary metallurgical testing, as well as secondary product testing and development in Australia, Europe, North America, and China, which also involved the collection of large bulk samples. Siviour graphite has been tested for physical, chemical, and electrochemical qualities, including by numerous overseas anode and battery manufacturing companies, and so found to be suitable [for very high standards required for a manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries]. Our people have worked with the local people, the local Aboriginal people, as well as representatives of local, South Australian state, and the Australian government to complete environmental studies and establish suitable process water supplies. It's a dry-old state, as many of you know, I'm sure, to enable a full definitive feasibility study to be completed, leading to all the necessary approvals to both commence mining at Siviour and to commence the manufacture of PSG in the northern outskirts of Adelaide and Balapar. All of that is our social license, which you [hear about a lot, and we have all those approved, and that's important to know.]"
There is the timing, a matter which I dwelled upon at this time last year in 2024, being an early mover into graphite and striving to catch the work, while our enthusiasm was guided by international commodity experts and the judgment of our management and supported by our many shareholders, passing all the tests of discovery, product assessment, and a whole host of approvals, as well as landing on the right place in the graphite demand curve, growth curve, seems to be a bit like Neil Armstrong guiding a blue ladder onto the right spot in 1969. He did not land where it was planned by many years of study. Instead, he had to travel on some more to find a safe place where he made a successful landing at the start of an avalanche of success.
In our experience over many years of exploring and mining commodities other than graphite, never before have we had to take the button when our chosen commodity was a fundamental part of the biggest ever social and technological change to the world energy system. We call it the energy transition. I can think of a few words other than transition, which might be more descriptive of the gravity of the change we're facing. We all know that there is some quantity of energy in everything we use or do. How we manage energy, in particular, determines present and future prosperity of the world's people, not just little old Adelaide town where we plan to create some wealth.
Over a period of about 200 years, fossil fuel-generated energy, fossil fuel-generated energy, should I say, took the world population from being about 90% in poverty to being about 90% above the poverty line. It's a wonderful achievement that human race has done. Now we must substantially leave behind the great benefit of these fossil fuels. Consequently, politics is deeply involved in the market for our future products, particularly international sector politics, affairs brought on by national security, security of supply lines, and the daily lives of people, all wrapped up in a huge clash between democratic capitalism and state-supported economic systems. Even the variable conviction which world leaders have about both need and pace of change for the energy transition, and the standout there, of course, is President Trump, who has a different idea than a lot of the world.
China is by far the world leader in the production of graphite and graphite materials, such as PSG, lithium-ion batteries, and electric vehicles, sometimes called EVs, producing about 90%, that's right, 90% of all these products. China has grown its manufacturing industry rapidly, such that it now is responsible for more than 1/3 of the world's manufacturing industry. In doing so, apart from being clever and industrious, that country operates under a command-based economic system, which, through the provision of numerous state-provided business advantages, including state-owned enterprises, we often hear them described as SOEs, is able to control the price of raw materials and manufactured [goods for their national advantage]. Prices of graphite and other battery materials for about two years have been at levels too low for profitable production to justify the commitment of capital to build new graphite mines outside of China.
These low graphite prices have also encouraged the Chinese to use synthetic graphite as competition for natural graphite, even though the production of synthetic graphite uses substantial amounts of fossil fuel as feedstock and the process, giving up excessive CO2 gas, undesirable consequences in these energy transition low-carbon times. China has been very successful in creating relative wealth for many of its people through such industrialisation, but the fear of counterbalancing de-industrialisation in the rest of the developed world is leading an international political movement to restrict the continued growth of Chinese manufactured import into these countries. Consequently, our timing for bringing our graphite products to market is substantially dependent on the establishment of an ex-China market and prices, which will involve our cooperation and partnership with overseas anode and battery manufacturers in countries such as South Korea, Japan, the U.S., and Europe.
Renascor's senior management are now heavily involved in this process with the involvement of the Australian and U.S. government officials. As part of this process, there is a movement to limit some of what is regarded as unfair business and trade practices in China from affecting the rest of the world, most likely by using secondary trade processes like import tariffs and quotas. These will be designed to encourage the manufacture outside of China of PSG, anodes, lithium-ion batteries, and electric vehicles, and stationary electrical grid storage batteries used to stabilize modern electricity and national grids when using renewable power generation. The maturation of this ex-China market is still in progress, but progress is real and can be measured with comments in the international news almost daily.
There is still a level of uncertainty which may be inhibiting some of the necessary decisions and decision-making by the ex-China anode and battery manufacturers. However, at the same time, the actual and predicted growth in demand for electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries remains strong, even if slightly delayed, with a clear international expectation that we have passed the point of no return on the electrification of nearly everything. World leaders are intent on decarbonizing electricity generation and industry. Lithium-ion batteries are essential for electric vehicles. The electricity grids fed substantially by renewable wind and solar generation depend on batteries for instant grid stabilization, and by instant, I mean just in seconds. Once grids get wobbled, they need to be stabilized just in seconds, and batteries can do that; otherwise, the whole thing falls over. That cannot be achieved by other means, as presently known.
Renascor is fortunate to have the support of the Australian government, which has offered our company the financial assistance of an AUD 185 million loan from Australia's Critical Minerals Fund. We're still to take advantage of this offer to be available as part of our project construction capital. In addition, Renascor has received, or we're still receiving, a cash grant of AUD 5 million on a dollar-for-dollar basis to assist in the cost of engineering and building our PSG demonstration plant in Adelaide. Our board and John were fortunate to visit that with our senior management just yesterday, and it's a nice-looking plant so far. This plant will demonstrate at pilot plant scale the effectiveness of our spherical graphite purification process to produce PSG at better than 99.95% carbon. That's very pure graphite. Purity, that's purity, without using hydrochloric acid, along with recycling our processed water through water treatment.
These processes have been clearly demonstrated at the varying scale by our purification test work completed as part of our definitive feasibility study. Our Managing Director, David Christensen, on my left here, will provide you with some more details about our progress with this plant later in our meeting. Finally, during this year, Renascor has completed a competitive early contractor involvement, sometimes called an ECI process, with the commitment of some highly qualified engineering contractors, which will enable the rapid progress to the commencement of construction for the Siviour mine and mineral processing plant, assuming we're able to reach a final investment decision. As I said last year, timing is everything.
Renascor is substantially ready to build the two parts of our graphite-based BAM, or battery anode materials project, the upstream Siviour mine and mineral processing plant near Arno Bay in Cleve, and our downstream PSG plant at Bolivar in Adelaide, which will be fed with graphite concentrate from the Siviour mine. Our 20,000 shareholders, our staff, our board, and all of the local South Australian stakeholders are keen to see this happen. We have all the necessary permits along with Australian government support through the critical minerals supply chain developments. The Australian government is working with the U.S.A. and other democratic countries in Asia and Europe to assist in the development of an ex-China critical minerals supply chain. Graphite is clearly a critical mineral and is being treated as such by our government.
The inevitable forward momentum for lithium-ion batteries is clear, with the world needing secure ex-China sources of graphite and PSG. While the path to bringing this new supply into production is not always straightforward, it is imperative that Renascor continues to advance towards construction and production [to ensure our shareholders may benefit. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen]. Now I'll move on to the formal proceedings of the meeting. First of all, with respect to the notice of meeting, I now table the notice of meeting, which was made available to all shareholders, and if there is no objection, I propose that the notice of meeting be taken as read. No objections to that. Thank you.
I advise that no notice of any other items for today's agenda have been received and therefore declare that the only matters for our meeting today that can be dealt with are those set out in the notice of meeting. I will conduct the meeting by referring to the resolutions in a PowerPoint presentation. Should any member have a question in relation to any of the motions being considered, there will be an opportunity to ask questions prior to voting. The financial report and report of the directors and auditors, we move to that, and the first item of business is to receive and consider the financial report, directors' report, and independent auditor's report for the financial period ending June 30, 2025.
I inform the meeting that a copy of the company's annual report for the period ending June 30, 2025 was lodged with the ASX on the September 30th, 2025 and sent to those shareholders who requested a hard copy. Of course, there's a copy available online on our website and on the stock exchange mine feed announcements as well. A copy of the company's 2025 annual report is available on the company's website. I just said that in the meeting. Please note that our auditor, Paul Gosnell from BDO, is present today, and of course you may ask questions. He's down the back there, [and he's independent of the board]. We're not required to formally adopt these documents. However, I invite discussion on the financial statements. Is there any discussion or questions of the auditor or the directors upon those? Thank you. There is no discussion.
I now move to the next item, which is Resolution 1, the [remuneration report]. I inform the meeting that the explanatory notice accompanying the notice of meeting and the company's financial statements provide the background and details of the remuneration report. Please note that the key management personnel of the company, including directors and their closely related parties, are excluded from voting on this resolution set out in the notice of meeting. I now move the motion to consider and, if appropriate, to pass with or without amendment the resolution contained on the slide as an ordinary resolution. I can't see it from here, but I have an email read. I now invite discussion on that motion. Are there any comments or questions to be asked? Thank you.
Voting on this resolution will be held, along with all other resolutions, held over until the conclusion of the final item of business to allow the poll to be conducted. Since there's no further discussion on that resolution, I move to the next item, Resolution 2, the re-election of Jeff McConachy as a director. Jeff's right here on my right-hand side. I inform the meeting that the explanatory notice accompanying the notice of meeting provides the background and details of this item. I didn't think he was an item, although he's a guy. Anyway, he's an item here. I refer to the resolution as presented to you on the slide. I now move the motion to consider and, if appropriate, to pass with or without amendment the resolution as an ordinary resolution. I presume we've all had some time to read it. The directors, with Mr. McConachy abstaining from making a recommendation, recommend that shareholders vote in favor of Resolution 2, and I invite discussion on that motion. Maybe I did that before, but anyway, is there any discussion? Thank you.
Voting on this resolution will be held over until the conclusion when we conduct the poll. There is no further discussion. I will now move to the next item. The next item is Resolution 3. This is approval for the issue of Financial Year 2026 LTI or long-term incentive performance rights under Renascor Resources Limited Performance Rights Plan to the Managing Director, David Christensen. I inform the meeting that the explanatory notice accompanying the notice of meeting provides the background and details of this item. I refer to the resolution as presented to you on the slide.
I now move the motion to consider and, if appropriate, to pass with or without amendment the resolution as an ordinary resolution. That resolution is right behind me, but I guess you can see it. The directors, other than Mr. Christensen, do not have any interest in the outcome of Resolution 3 and recommend, with Mr. Christensen abstaining, that shareholders vote in favor of Resolution 3. I now invite discussion on that motion. Is there any discussion or questions? Thank you. If there's no further discussion, I will now move to the next item.
The next item is [Resolution 4, the approval for the issue of 713,202. We left the point right off the item; it's just 202. Performance rights under Renascor] Resources Limited Performance Rights Plan to Managing Director, David Christensen. I inform the meeting that the explanatory notice accompanying the notice of meeting provides the background and details of this item. I refer to the resolutions presented to you on the slide, and I now move the motion to consider and, if appropriate, to pass with or without amendment the resolution as an ordinary resolution. As per what's behind me. The Directors, other than Mr. Christensen, do not have any interest in the outcome of Resolution 4 and recommend, with Mr. Christensen abstaining, that shareholders vote in favor of Resolution 4. I now invite discussion on that motion. Are there any questions, comments, or discussion? Thank you. There being no further discussion, I now move to the next resolution.
Resolution 5 is the approval of a 10% placement facility. I inform the meeting that the explanatory notice accompanying the notice of meeting provides the background and details of this item. As the approval of the 10% placement facility is a special resolution, I note that it requires the approval of 75% of the votes cast by shareholders on this resolution. I refer to the resolutions presented to you on the slide, and I now move the motion to consider and, if appropriate, to pass with or without amendment the resolution as a special resolution. The directors believe that this resolution is in the best interest of the company and unanimously recommend that shareholders vote in favour. In particular, the ability of the company to issue new shares under the 10% placement capacity will enable the company to issue shares in circumstances where it might otherwise be subjected to the cost, delay, and uncertainty of having to go back to shareholders for approval.
The additional flexibility and speed to conduct capital raising will better position the company to pursue its interests in the providing market conditions. I now invite discussion on that motion. Is there any questions or comments? Thank you. There being no further [questions or comments on that, we now need to conduct the poll] for all of those resolutions. You have all had the opportunity also to see the count of the proxies that have already been submitted. Of course, some people here might vote in person rather than by proxy. I declare the poll open. Would you please now complete your voting card? If you require any assistance, please raise your hand. When you have completed your voting card, please place it in one of the ballot boxes that will be circulated around. All votes have been cast. Thank you. I now declare the poll closed.
After the votes have been counted, the results of the poll will be released to the ASX and will be displayed on the company's website. I thank the members, all of you, for your attendance. If there is no further business, I declare this meeting closed. Once again, I would like to thank you for your time today and thank you, shareholders, for continued investment and support. David Christensen, our Managing Director, will now present an update on the company's progress, which technically is after the meeting is closed, but that is the way we normally do it. Over to you, David, and welcome to the microphone.
Great. Thanks very much, Dick. On behalf of all of us here, the directors, John, our company's outgoing CFO, thanks to you, our shareholders, for those of you who are here this morning or maybe listening to this presentation. We really do appreciate the opportunity to engage directly with you, take your questions, talk to you not just about what we're doing, about the reasoning behind it, where we see the market going and where we see the real opportunity. We have started to do regular semi-annual webinars, which is just a really good way to communicate. We were very pleased to see the degree of participation we got from shareholders in terms of numbers and also the very insightful questions. As a company, we are in a privileged position to have not just a large number of shareholders, but shareholders have been quite supportive through the ups and downs of the graphite market. I think the enthusiasm that hopefully you see from us as a board is clear.
I know many of you feel the same way, that we have a tremendous opportunity on our hands, and we take that responsibility very seriously. With that, let's get into a brief presentation. Apologies if this is an old hat to some of you, but I want to sort of set the table, and then we'll have the opportunity for a detailed Q&A. Can we go a couple of slides forward to slide three on the presentation? Okay, just Renascor Resources. For those of you who aren't familiar with us, we discovered and are developing what's become really a world-class graphite deposit here in South Australia.
Our plan at Renascor is to produce not just a mine graphite product, but we want to take advantage of the fact that we have this truly world-class asset, not in China, not in East Africa, but here in Australia, in a modern industrial jurisdiction, a jurisdiction that has not only the mining infrastructure but the industrial infrastructure and the safety from a sovereign perspective to do higher value-added work. Our plan is to refine that into purified spherical graphite and deliver it to the lithium-ion battery industry. As a mining project, we have the potential to become one of the lowest-cost producers of graphite in the world. By moving one step further downstream, we have the potential to be the lowest-cost producer of purified spherical graphite outside of China. What are we doing to realise that objective? If we can flip to the next slide, please.
Am I coming through okay, guys? Yeah. Okay . To 2025, everything we've been doing has been really focused on reducing cost, reducing risk, reducing schedules to get into construction and production as quickly as possible. Dick touched on some of the items we were doing just by way of review. The early contractor involvement process was really about taking the engineering work that we had done over several years and looking at it again more closely, in more detail. We successfully completed that process to de-risk the engineering side. We've moved to on-site activities. We moved beyond traditional definitive feasibility study work to actually getting on-site and moving things forward, connecting to the electricity grid, working on the accommodation camp. That is designed to reduce the schedule, reduce the time to get into operation.
We've expanded our exploration base, and we're now looking forward to introducing a number of early-stage exploration discovery opportunities. Jeff's going to be leading our exploration team this weekend. One of those we'll talk a bit about as well. The majority of the work that we've been doing over the last 12 months has been on the downstream side on our purified spherical graphite demonstration facility. This has been a long process. We made a decision after doing many years of technical work on working out the flow sheet that in order to validate that, we'd have to build a demonstration plant to demonstrate that our engineering assumptions are correct. We were fortunate enough to be awarded a grant from the Australian government, an AUD 5 million co-funded grant. That grant was supported by some of our key international partners, POSCO in South Korea, Hanwha in Japan.
Now we're deep into that process. We've been putting out periodic updates. This is the company's single largest project we've undertaken to date. This is a large-scale facility. This is not a small thing. This is a big facility that's going to take our flow sheet at a larger scale and in a continuous cycle validate our flow sheet. We've gone through now preliminary design, detailed design, procurement, initial site prep. Now we're deep into the construction phase, and we're on schedule. We're on schedule to start on-site commissioning this quarter, full commissioning next quarter, and then moving into operation as we move into 2026. Really, the goal here is to demonstrate again that the advantage we have isn't just on the mining. It's on that downstream side to open up the market for us at Renascor as being the premier potential provider of purified spherical graphite to the exchange market. We think that's becoming increasingly important. I'll try to illustrate why in a brief discussion of the market. If we can just push forward two slides, please.
Okay. When we talk about graphite, we traditionally talk about lithium-ion battery demand. The reason we do that is because this really is a paradigm shifting in the use of graphite. Graphite has traditionally been used for industrial purposes and steelmaking. During the era where graphite wasn't used in lithium-ion batteries, it really didn't justify large investment from public companies like Renascor with multiple shareholders looking for large value creation. That's all changing now because of the growth of lithium-ion batteries.
The kind of chart you see up here on your right, hopefully everyone can see that, you've probably seen in many places before. I just want to make a couple of points on that. The first point is it's quite unusual to see continued compounded annual growth rates of 10%, 15%, 20%. We're seeing that in lithium-ion batteries, and we're actually seeing it on a year-to-year basis. If you're looking at the increases from 2022 to 2023 to 2024, we're seeing it again this year. One of the reasons for that is, simply put, lithium-ion batteries are becoming more efficient. When we first started this, I think the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries was about $120 per kilowatt-hour. We hope to look forward to the day when we could get down below $100 per kilowatt-hour.
We've really blown through that now in the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries. The point I want to make is this is really beyond the point of no return. The kind of growth we're seeing in lithium-ion batteries is going to outlast commodity cycles, political cycles. Lithium-ion batteries are here to stay, and that's good news for graphite. If we go to the next slide, we can see what's happened in 2025. This has been a transitional year in a lot of ways. We have a new administration in the United States that is impacting a lot of our businesses, those of us who are involved in selling international products. That's what we're doing. What's happening in 2025? It's really been more of the same. If we look at overall lithium-ion battery sales, they're up.
If we look at the targeted markets, what kinds of where our product is going to wind up, electric vehicle sales are way up in Europe. They're even up in the United States. This is with the removal of the 30D tax credit. We're seeing increased EV sales. The big news maybe in the sector is what's happening with stationary storage. Stationary storage has traditionally been a relatively small part of the overall use of lithium-ion batteries. The real volume that justifies large mines like us has generally been coming from electric vehicles. Stationary storage is growing at astronomical rates, 50%-60% compounded annual growth rates. Now, for the first time, energy storage is becoming increasingly important in the lithium-ion battery mix. Part of that is the simple increase in energy demand.
I think we read a lot about this with the introduction and really widespread use of artificial intelligence and data centers. That is growing demand. As Dick touched on, there is real efficiency in introducing energy storage systems to grid stability and making them more efficient. What has happened is we are seeing the percentage of lithium-ion batteries that are dedicated to energy storage growing, reaching 15%, 20%, 25%. It has gotten to the point where previously we looked at lithium-ion battery growth as largely being driven by economic considerations, the importance of EVs for the economic security of really every country that produces automobiles. Now something different is happening with the use of energy storage in grid stability. This is becoming a matter of energy security. It has really given rise to concerns that it is very important to ensure there are secure supply chains to maintain national security interests.
Now, where does graphite fit into this? If you go to the next slide, it plays a really key role because with lithium-ion battery demand growing, you can see this in the map here, 2024, 2025, lithium-ion battery demand is increasing in the United States. It's increasing in Europe. Where are the anodes coming from? They're coming from China. They're coming almost exclusively from China with respect to energy storage. These are LIB batteries. They're all coming from China. In the growth scheme, the anodes, where are the anodes coming from? Here, we're not only seeing Chinese domination. We're seeing near monopoly control of the supply chain by the Chinese. With spherical graphite control, 99%. 99%, that's near monopoly control. Similar in the anode sides, 97% for natural, 98% for synthetic.
What this is leading to is suddenly graphite and anode are becoming important from a public policy perspective because it is impacting geopolitical issues. If we go to the next slide, what are the Chinese doing about this? Are the Chinese gladly giving us all the material? Today, yes. Yes, they are. They are also making threats. For the third time this year, China introduced export restrictions. What they have been doing is threatening to withhold the supply of lithium-ion battery anodes. At the same time, the growth rate is increasing. We have seen a similar pattern in rare earths where the Chinese are effectively using their domination over an important supply chain to extract other trade concessions. If we go to the next slide, what is the United States doing about it?
The U.S. is an interesting market because it's the one market that has a large enough demand and speaks as one voice where they can make public policy changes that can quickly change the supply chain. Are they turning their attention to graphite and anode? Yes. Yes, they are. We already have a preliminary countervailing duty case against Chinese importation of anode of over 100%. This has effectively stopped Chinese anode material from moving from China into the United States. At the same time, we have what they call Section 232 investigations into critical mineral supply chains. This is a national security power of the executive branch of the U.S. government. This is important. Critical minerals have been identified as important to national security.
The Section 232 investigations, as Dick alluded to, have the potential to very quickly change the supply chain and mandate non-Chinese supply chains. This is the market that we're looking to get into at Renascor. What's Australia doing to fit into this? If we go to the next slide, here in Australia, we do not have the demand to change markets. What we do have is we have the high-quality mining resources. We are seeing increasing support from the Australian government to look at its critical minerals projects and what it can do to ensure that they are going to be part of the next China supply chains. We have already been a major beneficiary of some of the initiatives here in Australia. Dick mentioned the AUD 5 billion grant from the International Partnerships Initiative and the AUD 185 million conditional loan into the critical minerals facility.
The government is increasingly turning its attention to what more it can do to promote projects, the kinds of projects that have not only tier-one mining assets but the ability to refine. Here again, the competition that we're looking at is not refining in competition with the Chinese, but it is against the rest of the world. Here we have major advantages in Australia to take tier-one assets like our Siviour resource, combine it with the downstream operation to produce refined material to this exchange market. One of the particular ones we're looking at is the strategic reserve fund right now. Our government is increasingly turning its attention to the kinds of projects that can combine Tier 1 assets with the ability to refine here. Now, while all this is going on, what is the commercial market doing?
If we go to the next slide, our target customer are manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries for Western cell makers, Western battery makers. This market is decidedly centered in Northeast Asia. If we look at 2024, six companies provided the vast majority of all of the anode material that went into Western batteries. It is likely to be the same six companies this year. Now, prices are low. They are low not only for the non-Chinese anode makers. They are low for the Chinese anode makers. Despite these low prices, these groups are still expanding. We are seeing POSCO expand in South Korea. We are seeing Mitsubishi Chemical expand in Japan. Even the Chinese are moving offshore now. They are doing this because they want to participate in these exchange supply chains.
What they're going to need for that is they're going to need graphite, exchange graphite, exchange purified spherical graphite. Our strategy at Renascor is to be the preferred provider of this material. All right. Let's turn our attention briefly to where we are on our project. If we go to the next slide and push forward again one more to what we're doing. Again, let's set the table for what we're trying to do here at Renascor. We have what we call a vertically integrated operation. What that means is we're combining two operations. A traditional mining operation where we mine the material, we mine graphite concentrate, sometimes called flake graphite. Then we have a secondary operation where we upgrade that material to refine it, a two-step refining process, a milling and a purification.
The product we produce is purified spherical graphite or PSG. That is used by manufacturers of lithium-ion battery anodes, the negative part of the battery. They put a specialized coating on that material. It becomes active anode material. It goes to a battery maker or cell maker who assembles that into battery packs before providing it to electric vehicle manufacturers and stationary storage manufacturers. Now, why do we think we can do this efficiently? If we go to the next slide, it really starts with the resource. Siviour is a special resource. It is special for a number of reasons. It starts with its scale. It is a big resource, not only in terms of Australia, but big in the world context. It is the second largest proven reserve of graphite in the world. It is the largest reserve outside of Africa.
Maybe more to the point, if we go to the next slide, it's not only big, it's efficient. It has amongst the lowest projected operating costs globally, the lowest projected capital intensity globally. Seviour is truly a world-class resource. Finally, if we go to the next slide, we're development ready. We have completed our technical work, our definitive feasibility studies. We have moved past that on-site work. We have all of our major regulatory groups in place. We have a good cash balance. We have a conditional loan from the Australian government. We purchased the land. We again moved forward on those on-site works. We have a social license with our digital industry in Bangalore. We're a shovel-ready project. If we go to the next slide, there's actually more to Renascor than simply being a mining operation.
That is by moving downstream, moving into the production of purified spherical graphite. That allows us to become an integrated battery materials company, so more than just a mining project. Why are we doing that? It is probably worthwhile just reflecting briefly what the opportunity here is. One of the reasons we are doing this is market access by producing purified spherical graphite, by doing that additional step of selling into the high-growth lithium-ion battery sector. These are good customers. These are companies with large balance sheets, the kind of companies that can provide bankable offtake that allow us to underwrite a large-scale operation here in Australia. This also allows us to lean on something that we do quite well here in Australia, which is our very developed, very mature refining and engineering sectors.
The challenge in moving and producing purified spherical graphite really is not a technical challenge of producing a high-grade product in the mine. It is doing it efficiently at scale. The engineering sector, the refining sector, is traditionally something that we have done very well here. We are truly leaning on that expertise to get that competitive advantage on the downstream side. I guess the final reason why we are vertically integrating is because this is a way to create more value, more value for our customers, more value for Renascor, more value for you, our shareholders. Maybe the easiest way to put this is something that we have said already. By producing a mine project, Siviour has the potential to be among the lowest producers of mine graphite product globally. By moving that one step further downstream, we can be the lowest-cost producer of this material outside of China.
If we go down to the next slide, we can sort of reflect on why we believe we have this very strong competitive advantage. It starts with the graphite ore body itself. The single largest input cost in producing purified spherical graphite is the graphite itself. If we have a low-cost source, we have an advantage b ecause we have that source here in Australia, where we have not only the ability to mine it, but we have the industrial infrastructure to have a secondary refining operation, we have a major logistical advantage. We're not taking our material, shipping it to another country, upgrading it there. We have a mining operation on the transport corridor to the port. We upgrade that into purified spherical graphite and deliver it directly to our customer. We're doing it here in Australia.
The other low-cost graphite developments traditionally are in East Africa, the kinds of countries that do not have the security to do a higher value-added product like we have here in Australia. I will emphasize what the additional advantage we see in doing this is it allows us to do something we do quite well here, which is take an engineering solution and develop it efficiently at scale. That, indeed, is why we are getting into this detailed work. It is why we are going forward and we are vertically integrating. All right, go to the next slide. What is keeping us busy right now? We have done a significant amount of onsite work. The work in connecting us to the grid reduces the overall risk and reduces the time to build and get into construction. We recently announced that we secured an accommodation facility.
That is going to be utilized not just for the construction operation, but for the operation of the mine itself. If we go to the next slide, we have a picture here of some of the graphite we have produced from a bulk sample. We took a 730-ton bulk sample. It has a lot of material. To give you an idea of how big that is, we take the graphite ore and we deliver it in shipping containers. You can fit a little bit less than around 20 tons of graphite in one shipping container. If my math is correct, that is about 37 shipping containers, 40-foot shipping containers of graphite that we have now transformed into graphite concentrate that we put into the sort of bulk of that. You are seeing the image here. That is currently in transit to Adelaide, where we'll be using it in our PSG demonstration facility. If we go to the next slide, we can touch on that PSG demonstration facility and what we're trying to accomplish there.
Next slide, please. What are we doing here with this PSG demonstration facility? We began doing initial test work on taking our graphite concentrate and upgrading it to 99.5% battery-grade graphite probably about six or seven years ago. We tried several different flow sheets and have been continuously trying to optimize that into an efficient way to produce purified spherical graphite. What we found is, again, it's not very difficult to get there in the lab. The question is, can you do that efficiently? The purpose of this PSG demonstration plant is to go that one extra step.
This will be the last step before we build the commercial plant. What this does for us is it'll allow us to validate this process. We already have a major competitive advantage in having the Siviour Graphite Deposit, which is unmistakably one of the premier world-class graphite assets. Why we're doing this demonstration facility is to get a secondary advantage in processing that material and validating that process. Again, we can be the lowest-cost producer of this material outside of China. If we go to the next slide, these photographs are from our release this morning. We've been trying to give periodic updates of progress. Without going into too much detail, things are going well. We're on schedule. We're on time. We're deep into equipment installation at this stage. We expect to be doing onsite commissioning this quarter. We expect to be doing full commissioning and moving into operation in the new year.
The purpose here is we want to be the go-to company for purified spherical graphite outside of China. We think we have amongst the best graphite deposits. If we combine that with this PSG demonstration, we think we're the best solution for purified spherical graphite outside of China. This is probably a good segue into our next slide on offtake. Our offtake strategy has and continues to be to align with the leading manufacturers of anode material for the Western markets. We already have non-binding offtake and strategic operation agreements with two of the largest groups in the sector, POSCO in South Korea and Mitsubishi Chemical in Japan.
What we want to offer is the thing they can't really get from anyone else, which is a secure, ready supply of purified spherical graphite. If we look at the market for the last couple of years, it's not just the graphite market, which has struggled. It's the wider battery minerals and processing complex. That includes anode makers who've been under really tremendous pressure with low-priced material coming out of China. It's made it very difficult for these groups to exist in this environment. We're seeing a shift. It looks like now we're entering into a new phase. What's the evidence of that? It's the expansions. These groups continue to expand. They continue to expand, in particular, outside of China to service the ex-China market.
Probably the single greatest example of this over the last several months is the recently announced large-scale agreement that POSCO entered into to provide anode material to a U.S. OEM. This environment favors particularly well for us at Renascor because these groups urgently need good supplies of graphite and purified spherical graphite for their expansion plans. We are the most readily available alternative for them. Okay. Moving on. Next slide. A few words on exploration. If we go to the next slide, we recently have been giving you more information about some of the reconnaissance work that we've been doing on the exploration side.
We're quite fortunate at Renascor to have a very successful exploration team, one that's been behind a number of the major discoveries here in South Australia, in particular, over the last several years, not just Siviour, but other deposits here in South Australia. What we want to do is we want to offer near-term opportunities for major discoveries. What we're finding in the market right now is good opportunities, good low-cost opportunities to discover major deposits. We're going to be embarking soon on one of those on our Blue Creek. Jeff and the team are going to be heading out this weekend to drill what looks like a very large-scale magnetic anomaly. This is an immediate discovery opportunity. If we go to the next slide, we have a similar opportunity with our R&RE project.
Here, we picked up what looks like a standout radiometric anomaly that was discovered using the process data from the mines department. This is a major drill-ready uranium/copper target. We are going through the approvals process here. We expect to be drilling this project next year. We will share a little bit of information for you today as well on the next slide about another one of the other reconnaissance efforts we have been working on, which is on rare earths. Rare earths are, again, becoming increasingly valuable because of their use, in particular, in heavy magnets and, again, the Chinese stranglehold on the rare earth market. We have a historic resource not too far from our Siviour deposit where we got reassayed some of the holes and found very impressive rare earths, in particular, with a high proportion of heavies. This is a relatively early-stage reconnaissance prospect.
Right now, what we're looking at is we're looking to see if we can put some scaling and turn it into something that's going to be economic and looking at some of the metallurgical characteristics. You can expect more on Tumby Bay as we move into the new year. What we'll be doing is we'll be looking to work through the approvals on these and other projects and try to give you immediate discovery opportunities. All right. If we go to the next slide, just sort of wrapping up where we are and what comes next for Renascor over the next several weeks, the next several months. For quite a bit. Again, we expect to be very active on the exploration side. I think Blue Creek is really just the start of it. You can expect some more news on that.
On the PSG demonstration plant, we're really, really excited to get this working. Again, this is the single largest project we've undertaken as a company. We'll be entering into the commissioning stage, into the operation stage. We think that's a major opportunity to unlock value. In parallel, we're working on trying to finalize binding offtake agreements to allow us to underwrite a financing on a large-scale operation and make a final investment decision. The other thing that impacts us, of course, is the graphite and the anode market. We've seen in the rare earth sector that change can happen quickly and can open up major opportunities for companies that are ready to do that. Certainly, that's exactly what we're trying to do at Renascor. I'll stop here.
I know I probably spent more time than I probably should have talked about these things, but we'll take some questions here. If you don't feel like asking questions beforehand, we'll stay [after to mingle and answer questions individually as well]. I'll stop here now. I think we're going to stop the formal webcast now. Those of you who are listening, thanks again for your attention. We'll stop the formal webcast now. Maybe I'll put down the microphone and hopefully take some questions, not just from me, but from the entire board.