Okay, it's just gone 10:32 A.M. here in Perth. Welcome everyone to the Q4 Talga Group Quarterly Investor Webinar. Today, we'll hear a presentation from Talga Group's Managing Director, Mark Thompson, about the group's recent updates. Following Mark's presentation, there will be a Q&A. Thank you to everyone who submitted a question ahead of time. You can also submit a question during the presentation through the Q&A function on Zoom. We have received quite a few questions, so if we don't get to your question, feel free to get in touch with us after the webinar at info@talgagroup.com. I'll welcome Mark Thompson, Managing Director of Talga Group. Mark, over to you.
Thank you, Candice, and hello everyone on this fine and potentially auspicious day. Today, I'm just going to do things a little bit differently. We're just going to reflect directly on the quarterly events. I'm not going to do a rehash, I guess, of the company too much, and then we'll work on all your questions, which have been coming in in various locations. Let's get going. We will, however, start with, I guess, the normal disclaimer you have to do on presentations and things, I should say, and also just summarizing that for some time now we have, since first mentioning the recyclability of graphite, which was thought to be technically not really feasible a few years ago, that we've managed to crack that.
That's why in more recent times you would see that in this summary of what Talga Group does as a fully integrated battery material and technology company, just recognizing that the feedstock, the start of the process, can actually be fed both from mined material and from recycled material. Now, we are not doing the recycling ourselves. That is from black mass, separates graphite from the recyclers, and then that can be provided. The downstream of Talga Group's anode production technology, which is the purification, shaping, and coating to make anode ready for sale to battery manufacturers, that's, shall we say, quite transferable. It can be duplicated in different parts of the world.
The company certainly has had this potential for a while, but it's needed a certain maturity of supply, a maturity of technology, a maturing of the entire, you know, the global, the geopolitical spectrum as well to support the sort of expansion that is possible now using our technology, which we already own. That's just a general intro for those of you that were wondering. In the background there, you can see something that might be a little bit more relevant later, which is our planned stage one anode refinery, which, you know, this is based off the front-end engineering and design drawings. These aren't just artist mockups. They're actually quite detailed internally. We can't show you a lot, obviously, on the tech, which is proprietary, but you can see there are approximately four lines of anode.
The purification plant's on the right, and on the left, you've got four anode production lines of about 5,000 tons each now for just under 20,000 tons of anode production. You can also see a yellowish area to the side of that where there's some space to build additional lines, which is relevant to the recycling potential or recycled feed potential. Let's look back over the last quarter. It was very significant. People forget, it was only two months ago that the exploitation concession for the graphite mine in Nunswear South was fully cleared with all appeals dismissed after a very, very long period indeed. Obviously, most people are familiar with the extremely long environmental permit process that happened after it was initially granted. It took several years of appeals.
The exploitation concession, which in Australia we would call like a mining license, also underwent a series of appeals which culminated in the government dismissing all of the appeals. That was only in June. For any of those that work in the northern hemisphere, July and August since June are not the most busy times, shall we say, in the northern hemisphere, particularly in the Nordic countries. People are only just starting to come back to work now since that decision was made. That was a very big milestone. It does leave what is called the detailed plan. The detailed mine plan is something that we actually first, I think, delivered in 2020 to the local municipality and started working with them on it. Over the years, it was delayed. It was played around with.
It also needed the environmental and exploitation permits to get into force to really come along and trigger the details on that as well. It's like the last remaining part of that permitting process regarding the mine. In the meantime, some of the regulations around that, the regulations within Sweden have changed, and that required then once we managed to get the county administration board to be responsible for it instead of the local municipality, we're working very closely with them. They've actually been quite rapid. They were actually onto it straight away. We've actually had a good relationship in working with them to expedite that process. It has coincided with this holiday season. Also, what happened was that originally that detailed plan was for the site to include all the Niska expansion area as well.
To make things go faster, we've agreed to sort of divide the project into essentially a north and a south, and the southern bit is where the mining concession and the environmental concession are. They're going to be done first and the balance later. That does need amending. That's happened and is happening along with the new regulations. We do not have an indication of timeline for when that process happens, but it does mean that we can't get onto the mine site unless we do separate trial mining and so forth. We can't go onto the mine site for full-scale production and know exactly when that startup will be until that process is finished. Like all the other processes up there, you do not have any prescribed timeline, unfortunately. We can't give an indication of time.
I can tell you that prior to the holiday season, there was actually a good response and there's good relations there. We're just hoping that goes as timely as possible, but we can't commit to anything there. In reality, last quarter was quite significant on a number of levels. The exploitation concession is something that when we first went to Sweden 14 years ago this year, that was the main thing to look at. We didn't at that time probably understand the significance of a lot of the other details. In reality, from our feasibility studies getting done in 2019, 2020, to build one of, I mean, Sweden's only really had one or two mines built every 20 years at the most. You're only talking about five or six mines per century so far being permitted under the new regime. It's a difficult, expensive, difficult thing.
The prize is worth it. You've got the world's best way of making anode is from that Vittangi graphite deposit, which is an anode mine rather than a graphite mine. It just makes all anode material. It's quite special. As you can see in the background there on the left, that's a piece of the ore, just simply put on a CNC machine and milled. That's what it looks like straight out of the ground. We can use it in various ways. It's pretty special stuff. Eye on the prize. It's been excruciating. There's still some things left to do, but the big things have been done successfully and well. Kudos to all of the team involved over many years with it, from the environmental side, geology side, admin side, social side, the stakeholders, you name it.
It's a vast quantity of work that's been achieved over the years to make this happen. It sure is a big moat for anyone else trying to create anything anywhere. The permit situation in Sweden is improving under the strategic project status. I think it's getting better going forward. Certainly before that happened, we did a lot of hard yards and that's paying off now. As part of that, during the quarter, we were very happy to get net zero strategic project status. That's separate from the critical raw materials strategic project status. This is just for the refinery, excuse me, and is in some ways related to the ability for it to lower emissions and be a more sustainable way of forming anodes than currently. It reflects also that $70 million grant we got from Innovate. That is all really combined with the sustainability aspect.
Of course, there is a growing strategic aspect to what we're doing up there as well. We appointed WSP Global, who have been doing a huge amount of work with, and thanks to Paul and all the team at Talga that have interacted with WSP Global over time about building the project. We're getting ready for execution of the project. We've slightly increased the scale of our EVA plant because we've announced, coming up, the Nyobolt offtake, the qualified offtake, and the other materials that we're sending out to customers getting larger. There's been some board changes, and we certainly thank Steve and Ola for their long, long service to Talga. We welcome Eva, who sits on the board of our Swedish subsidiaries and is now on the main board.
We're very much enjoying working with Eva in her work that she's doing for us, particularly in Sweden and throughout the Nordics. We completed a small placement at a price about, I don't know, I guess 20% + ago, but that was good. There were some options and things involved with that, as there was on the previous raise. After the quarter ended, we appointed Niklas. We sort of split that role up a little bit. We're very happy to welcome Niklas to the Group Finance Director position. We also did an ASX release regarding our patent approval on Talnode-C, which I think some of this stuff can come out. I think there's some questions regarding these things, so I can speak to those a little bit more later.
Importantly, about the Nyobolt offtake for 3,000 tons over several years, what is not very well appreciated is that's post-qualification, meaning that Nyobolt have actually been working with our material for many years and using it in various products going out to customers, essentially in products that they're using, either at demonstration scale or commercial scale. We now want to scale up the supply to them. We obviously couldn't speak much to price other than that it matches what our, say, guidelines are around based on our studies that we've published.
I guess they reflect an interesting aspect of the battery customer market for us, which is that in a world of turmoil amongst EV makers, amongst car makers, robots, AI data centers, fast charging applications, battery energy storage systems that need high performance, high power anode, which is what Nyobolt specializes in, which is ultra fast charging anode system or battery systems, which are going into a range of things. You can see obviously in public things like sports cars, but you can see maybe other things that they've done over the years like robots, mobile charging, fast charger units. The important thing to recognize is that that is not like other offtake agreements you see, which are subject to qualification and hopefully things will work out in future. This has actually already been qualified and it's in commercial things. It is very good.
We want to do more of those sorts of things where customers have already used the product to the point where we're actually qualified now with multiple customers. While their business units are trying to sort out exactly what they're doing, we've got this opportunity to continue seeking higher price customers with niche products that can really be more committed and strategically linked into our material, which is really, really good. Obviously, you can see that in the way that we increased some income, just small amounts, but increasing from samples that we're selling with more of a focus on the battery energy storage systems, which are just booming like crazy. More industrial application batteries, again, like robots and so forth, both humanoid and otherwise. Hybrid vehicles, which use a different anode to standard sort of bulk Chinese stuff.
The difference with hybrid batteries is that they actually need the smaller battery and they want a lot more, they're very sensitive to regenerative power coming back into the system from the brake. They need really quick charge, not from being plugged in, but from the braking. They actually need essentially a fast charge product, which our material specializes in. We're seeing this continued shift across Europe, but also in Japan and the U.S. and other parts of the world now coming on board with wanting different non-Chinese supplies, essentially, to de-risk their supply chain. The geopolitics is really kicking in. As someone, you know, someone Bloomberg quoted the other day, ESG has turned into economics, strategy, and geopolitics. There is some truth to that while still retaining a sustainability base, which is important and long-term is very important for our customers.
It's important, I certainly agree with shareholders, but certainly there's a new dynamic playing out, which I think many of these sophisticated investors have been watching for a long time. You're surprised it's taken this long, but that's just the way the world's worked. They've finally gotten there. They've finally understood really only in the last six months where their materials come from, how they're made. They haven't really thought about it before, to be honest. On that point, you know, current anode supply, which is hugely reliant on China, has been in the news finally with the U.S., with the anti-dumping ruling over there to basically double the price of anodes within the U.S. if they're coming from China and working out that China has been subsidizing the capital of companies to create vast quantities of synthetic graphite from very low-quality coal and petrotars.
They've been over capacity and flooding the market with this product and therefore dropping prices. It's understandable, a little bit like what you're seeing in the lithium market at the moment, that capacity is now drying up. They're not investing in that anymore. Some of those companies are in somewhat financial trouble because they've basically been trying to squelch everything and just dump everything around. Frankly, the car companies have been sucking it up because they felt they needed to push prices down as well. That's changing. That's changing. What we first thought of, I guess, was a platform of sustainability underwriting. The popularity of this material is now turning a lot more strategic, which is if China turns off their supply, the world has nothing. What are they going to do about it? They've got to build new supply chains. Again, I'm preaching to the converted here.
Anyone that's a shareholder assumed that the whole world got this. To be honest, no, they didn't until recently. Both at various government levels, not just the U.S. government, but the European Union and other governments are just realizing both Japan and Korea are the same. You know, 100% of their natural supplies are all coming from China. This is one of the things that's woken them up, is the defense side. In defense, they're realizing that, for example, not only drones, but a whole range of defense-related equipment, from field equipment to planes to submarines to ships to techs, you name it, helmets with little laser rangefinders, 100% Chinese material in them. Even today, people that boast about having, say, for example, a fully Australian manufactured drone, that may be for the body of the drone, the battery, 100% coming from China, if not Asia.
Therefore, if that turns off, you have a strategic weakness there. The Haig Institute that first published this work on studying the different minerals that are most at risk found that graphite is the number one most at risk supply across all of the defense equipment supply chain. At the same time, you've seen this massive effort from governments to increase expenditure towards 5% of GDP. Just by contrast, at the moment, places like Germany and places like that were less than 2%. They're at like one and a half. It's the same with Sweden, so a little bit higher. I mean, you're talking about serious, serious 10's and 10's, possibly $100 of billions of dollars now is going to be going into looking at these supply chains for the first time. Talga actually, which was sitting in on a defense panel, we met all the defense primes fairly recently.
In talking to them, just a little anecdote personally, I was asking them, well, where do you get your batteries from? They're like, oh, we buy them from, you know, this place in Germany or this place from Switzerland. We said, oh, yeah, we know those companies. You know, that's 100% Chinese material. They said, no, no, we buy it from Switzerland or whatever. I said, no, no, they assemble it there and sell it to you. They don't, but everything inside is actually Chinese graphite, for example. If that gets turned off, you have no batteries from those European countries. This is the difference between assembly and manufacturing. They're suddenly slowly realizing all these governments and the defense primes are slowly realizing that really it's been several generations since anyone actually manufactured anything. They have no control over it whatsoever.
It was all sent off to China basically and has never come back. They're trying to rebuild it. Over time, it's happening. They're getting stuck into it. It might take a little while, but the good thing about anything on the defense side is that from a demand point of view, it can happen pretty quick. Their procurement processes are archaic, frankly, and slow and horrible, but they have some significant effects on where things go and what happens. I guess then just to summarize where we're at, we have in the last quarter since last week, you know, achieving that exploitation permit is a big deal. We've continued shifting things up in the European Union when it comes to our status, our strategic project status. The customers continue, to be honest, demand is going through the roof. I'll talk a little bit about that going forward.
We're starting to see deals come back into the market after two years of huge malaise and particularly the last year with the tariff situation, volatility stopping a lot of companies from really committing to things. That's had a big effect over the last 12 months. We're seeing new drivers of demand come up in things like defense and so forth. The whole system's getting shaken out and that's a good thing for Talga Group in its positioning. I gave time, not too bad, I hope. Recycling. This morning we put out, essentially we launched Talnode-R, which just to be very clear, this is not, we are not recycling material from batteries. Other people are recycling batteries. When they do that, they produce a thing called black mass, which is what they then extract metals from.
They try and recover the lithium, the cobalt, the nickel, the copper, aluminum, whatever metals they want to choose. The graphite isn't a metal. Currently it gets washed away in waste. Some processes recovering battery materials burn it and it literally gets oxidized away to nothing. What we've done is essentially we started testing, can we use graphite concentrates from that process and feed it into our purification process, which we developed for Vittangi graphite, which is quite unique. In the challenges we've solved there over the years, we've found that with a few tweaks, we can use the same system. It goes into the same shaping and coating system. We've got a proprietary way and we've actually produced very good quality battery material that can perform just the same as basically new synthetic. The process is very good in that it uses our alkaline-based purification system.
Here on the left, in the bottom left, you've got a picture there of some graphite concentrate from Altilium in the UK, who we have an offtake agreement with of supply from them to us. They have a supply from groups like Nissin and others that are public from material going to them. That's just within the UK. In other countries, we have different programs with groups like Aurubis and a large range of other programs underway with a bunch of other companies that are interested in this sort of material. Our process homogenizes those different sources. It cleans them up to battery grade. Especially important is our coating process, which lifts them up really from, didn't have time to really show you all the data here, but lifts it up from just sort of average to below commercial material into what can be used in an anode battery.
That's actually a big deal. People have been publishing results on this sort of stuff for what is called production scrap. When you make a battery in a lithium-ion gigafactory, as they're going, stuff's going through the rollers, you have trimmings off the edge of it. That material doesn't go into a battery. You can recover that. That graphite's never been used. Essentially, that anode is sitting on there. It's got a little bit of plastic in it. It's got some compounds in it. It's obviously got a lot of copper with it mixed in as well. That isn't that hard to purify, to be honest. People have used that. When you take an end-of-life battery, which long-term will be the largest volumes available, that's harder. It's been lithiated potentially thousands of times.
It's formed a massive range of different compounds that have intercalated into the very atomic lattice of the graphite in the anode. That is hard to get out. We thought we'd never get it out. We thought if you did, you'd damage the crystallinity and damage the lattice of the graphite. If you tried to use it in an industrial purpose, you probably could. Axle grease or something or a refractory, fine. It's low cost. That's a low-price product. The market isn't growing that fast. Frankly, it would be economically unfeasible. If you want to reuse it as a battery anode, that's been harder, but we've managed to do that. That is used battery material, totally purified to battery grade, reshaped, recoated. You can see here in the bottom right, we've got a pilot plant. We've already done this at industrial scale and it's continuing to scale up.
Essentially, at the back end of it, it looks very close to a copy of what our current anode process is. Therefore, you can have modular lines added for extra capacity somewhere like Vittangi. Of course, you could build a similar plant now in the U.S., Japan, Australia, Middle East, India, the UK, obviously, wherever you want to, wherever you have customers, wherever you have, obviously with lineup funding, customers, partners for it. It's a bit of an exciting development because it essentially takes all the technology that we have already invested in, that Talga shareholders already own, and that downstream part now just means it can spread around the world as a separate industrial technology. You can be an anode producer in other places. The idea isn't to do licensing. I don't see many people doing that well out of that sort of model.
Our model is to find the partners and the funding, both from government, state, local, and the actual customers themselves and partners. Basically, you can take this now as a package to different parts of the world and explore those opportunities. That's the blue sky for Talga now, in parallel with the world's greatest and lowest cost graphite anode production plant, which is through Vittangi. Regardless of what happens there and the scale of that over time, you can have other plants in other jurisdictions as well, using different feedstocks, using recycled feedstocks, and potentially other people's mined material as well, can probably go through the same process. The point being that you're just taking advantage of what you already have, which is anode production, which only a handful of companies, you know, in the West can do that. There's not many.
Talga's one of them that's been quite successful at it through our interactions with industry. As you can see from, you know, qualified material with various groups. What does it look like in that supply chain? Again, just to be clear, from battery production on the right, you can have production scrap, which will go off to a metal recycler, which in this case is called metal purification, meaning they're trying to extract all the metals from it. You can also have the black mass from used batteries going into that stage as well. They recycle it, not us. They, if they choose, make a concentrate, a graphite concentrate, and some recyclers won't bother. Like they might have a process that doesn't work or they don't want to. If they don't, they do have to deal with that graphite.
Either they're going to burn it or they're going to have to chuck it away in landfill or wash it down the drain. It is in their interest to do something with it. The quantity is getting quite, quite significant, as I'll show you on the next page. That graphite concentrate just becomes available to someone that can do something with it. To do something with it, you not only have to purify it, you have to know how to shape it and coat it to get it back into the form for a battery. If you want to do it yourself, obviously you could split it up. If you split it up, you're not really A, in control of it. B, you're not getting all the profit. You know, you're not getting all the full margins from it.
It's an innovative application of our existing technology and will allow us to expand globally faster than we could do just by expanding, you know, simply within Sweden on the natural material. However, it is needed to be said that recycled material, you know, does have losses along the way. It'll never fully replace fresh anode. The demand for batteries continues and will continue to grow for many decades. You still need new sources of supply like Vittangi for certainly for its performance characteristics, for its, you know, low LCA and so forth. You do have this resource that is going to continue to grow, which is recycled material being available to use downstream. That's all. We're obviously heavily aligned with a lot of government agencies, and there's some interesting funding opportunities.
We're really excited about some of the partnerships where we're currently very advanced with groups in these jurisdictions I mentioned earlier. Let's just start wrapping this up and get into the questions, which is what's going on then in the global. What does this mean when it comes to when you say there's lots of material? This benchmark row motion data shows about 3.5 million tons of total recycled material coming from batteries this year. That's not all active material. That's total mass, but it just goes to show how much there is. About 10%- 15% by weight of the active material is graphite. It's about 50% of the volume, but about 10%- 15% of the weight because the graphite's quite light. What you can see is this continuing to grow around the world and being fairly substantial and looking to quadruple over the next 10 years.
By the time you fund, build, and do something, you've got ever-increasing amounts of supply. On the right here, I just want to point this out from a relatively recent BMO, interesting BMO paper on graphite and anode materials. This is ex-China anode supply and demand. China obviously is a huge part of the supply market. It's also a huge part of the demand, and currently, they've built a huge amount of capacity. The global market is oversupplied with synthetic at the moment. That's been capping prices. That capacity is now stopping expansion. It's decreasing or the capacity is getting taken up, and prices are starting to rise again. When you cut China off from the equation from their subsidized sort of position that they have, then prices basically double.
I think BMO are quoting prices now in America with discounts on various tariffs and stuff of around $8,500 per ton, rising to $9,500 per ton over the next couple of years. That's just one data point. That's for bulk material. That's not for specialized, fast-charged material like we make or anything like that. What's interesting to me here is the huge deficit there is outside China in that there's just not enough production ex-China versus the amount of demand ex-China. There's a big gap. That's the reality of the world. If China turns off its exports or you tariff it and get it to be a more level playing field, like for like, you end up with that there is actually a real deficit in effect starting to apply and that's becoming more apparent. It's very interesting, I think.
We've currently got, just lastly, just reminding people that we've got this stockpile of material that Vittangi isn't really a graphite mine. It's really an anode mine. All the material goes into batteries. It's all the flake sizes or 100% for anode. We've got quite a lot of work there. I just want to say that we are very advanced in toll treating this material and getting an early start on anything we can build at the refinery. We are exploring options for fast tracking financing of the refinery and getting the first line of commercial scale built as soon as we can. There's a lot of work from the team going into that. As part of that, we're also doing some great work now on new larger tolling opportunities to get this material as a feedstock for that plant as soon as possible.
This was a concept that we had several years ago when we did the trial mine and that it would be an early feedstock supply for the refinery. That sort of overlapped with, we had some quick success in the early stages of the permitting. People felt that realized, but in the early days, there were actually some pretty quick decisions on appeals and we thought they would all overlap. It would be best to wait. You could just build the whole thing as one full-scale project. Now we're still looking at ways to maybe introduce getting the first line going and a lower cost startup on that. When we finalize those options and work out all the details and finish the feasibilities on them, then we'll talk to them. Until then, just another couple of things too, just to go back on the Talnode opportunity or the recycling.
A couple of shout-outs here. One is to, I appreciate everything our team has done. Everyone in Germany on the process in Sweden, from the Upper Diva plant in the office, admin, you name it, across the group in the UK, our science team there, fantastic. Everyone again from admin to battery making to the materials. There's a huge amount of things that you cannot see unless you come and visit Talga Group's operations under NDA and see what's really going on that underwrites all this and what you will read about over the next couple of quarters. Just two shout-outs I want to do. One is for Duncan, our, you know, the world's greatest metallurgist in my mind. Hope you get well, Duncan, thinking of you. Also on the intellectual property side, who behind our intellectual, a lot of our intellectual property work is Albert.
We're also thinking of you, mate, and hoping you get well as well. Just want to thank you so much for a big part of this, both with recycling and the way our tech is, is down to you guys as well. I just wish you all the best. At that point, I will leave off and throw back to Candice, please, and any questions.
Thanks, Mark. We're going to move to the Q&A portion of today's session now. Once again, thanks to everyone who submitted a question ahead of time or through the Q&A function on Zoom. Some questions have been addressed during the presentation, and others that we received beforehand have been consolidated into one question if several people asked the same question. We'll start with Nyobolt. There's been quite a few questions coming about that, the Nyobolt agreement. Mark, the Nyobolt agreement involves initial supply from the EVA plant, for which Talga Group has recently invested in larger equipment. Given past comments that the EVA isn't commercial scale, how might these upgrades affect Talga Group's ability to generate meaningful near-term revenue through this deal?
The Nyobolt offtake covers a sequence of events. It's actually starting, you know, like it's being delivered now from the EVA plant and then scales up through EVA and then into commercial production. It can't be, I guess, what you would call meaningful until it is at commercial scale. However, it is very meaningful insofar as that you have gone through all the processes you need to do fully qualified material being sent to a customer that's using it in a commercial sense. You can see the products operating. It's very meaningful from that point of view.
I think it's just an investment we have to make. The EVA does have room. You can go from like one shift to two shifts to 24 hours. There is, you don't have to physically make things bigger. It can just be sometimes operational that you can get a lot more performance out. As I said, we're looking into ways to bring in that commercial production earlier. I'm not sure if that fully answers what you're after, but just to say that it's a challenging, but something that we're managing within the scale-ups that we can see.
Thanks, Mark. Next question, something quite topical. How have the recent EU-U.S. trade agreement and the U.S. anti-dumping tariffs on graphite impacted Talga Group, particularly in terms of project execution or strategic planning?
It's all been very positive, apart from just people hearing about the stuff for the first time. If people go back a little ways, you might remember that in one quarter we had one of the senior members of Homeland Security in the U.S. actually visit our anode refinery. I don't think people really connected that very much at the time that there was amongst NATO countries, there's a lot of interest in cooperation. It's very good. I think that while there are opportunities to expand and send concentrates and material over to the U.S., now that they've got a higher pricing regime there locally, I believe that a lot of the same effects they're doing over there will happen in Europe anyway. By showing that we can have standalone anode production fed from different sources, we can go to America now as a market, as it matures. It's very interesting.
I can't, I don't think I can share the data here, but if you look at some of the recent data on graphite exports and things to America, you're seeing that the Chinese materials are plummeting. It's just plummeting down like this, and the Japanese and the Korean material are coming up. While the overall U.S. market has sort of shrunk a little bit on the EV side, the battery energy storage side has been going gangbusters. You're seeing customers that are clearly not necessarily having Chinese supply chains going forward going to the States. It's just been a positive. The negatives have just been the volatility, the tariffs on, tariffs off, dumping provisions, what's happening, what's going on with those. Rule changes are not very good for particularly groups like who make cars that can be an eight-year investment in some model. That volatility makes things difficult.
Overall, I'd say we just see more and more opportunities that are coming from nowhere. I mean, until recently, you're seeing Tesla and Ford both put in, you know, fully CATL equipment, software, and materials. You can see that over the next few years, that material supply has to change. You know, we'll get turned off under this regime. What's more, they have to convert to other supplies. That's good for everyone in the anode industry, not just Talga Group, but anyone else that's operating there. Certainly, it's big enough that there's proven opportunities now. I think the government funding in the rare earth space will come looking for battery materials as well. You're seeing the U.S. step into, you know, the lithium at Manono in the Congo. You're going to see, I think over the next few months, quite a lot more U.S.
interests being more visible in minerals in different parts of the world. I would hope that it would include us at some point as well. It's just another opportunity, but it's better than it was before. It's more diverse, more opportunities.
Another question staying with the U.S. Talga Group recently listed on the U.S. OTC QX and secured a U.S. patent for Talnode-C. Does Talga Group plan to license Talnode-C in the U.S.? Does Mark see U.S. expansion as a direct on-the-ground effort or more hands-off risk-mitigated licensing strategy?
No, we're not focusing on it as a licensing strategy at the moment. I mean, it might come up. There may be opportunities to do it, but I don't think so. I think there's a lot of know-how along with the tech. It's not just all on paper. There are some things that are not on paper for a reason. At the moment, we're looking at just not doing it, doing it physically. Looks like there's good margins depending on where you set up and how you set up and who with. No, we're just looking at straight up on the ground stuff at the moment.
Question about recycling. Is Talga the only partner handling graphite anode recycling with Altilium? What does Altilium's ACT3 plant processing materials from 24,000 EVs per year mean for Talga's revenue and production? Will this happen at the Luleå refinery? What graphite anode tonnage is expected?
Oh, crikey. There's probably a bunch of commercial incompetent stuff there, but, you know, we have already announced that there's an offtake of material from Altilium to Talga that is available, that they're committing to supply to us. That can be up in Sweden or it can be a separate standalone plant in the UK. It depends on the exact financing mechanisms. I cannot speak to if Altilium have other partners. Certainly, you know, they're public with us. I can't speak to if they have others that are involved in their graphite, in handling their graphite and doing something with it. Does that cover enough of that? Obviously, I couldn't speak to, I mean, the volumes are public. Can't speak to revenue.
All I can say is that what's happening in the UK is interesting because they, like a lot of other places, the media and the press are, you know, they're obsessed with dumping on EVs at the moment. I think mostly because they're trying to dump on Musk more than anything. It's interesting that the data belies that, right? You're now up to like 30% of all new cars in England or in the UK are electric. I think you're over 60% in Denmark. You're obviously at well over 95% in places like Norway. I think you're up to nearly 60% in some parts of, you know, China. Total EV exports from China now, including over to the UK, are up nearly double, you know, so 80%. There's that, I guess, there's the media stuff or the way people feel.
What's actually you're seeing in the data is faster uptake, bigger volumes than you thought. That's just been proven. This is factual data. That's all the way through these horrible depressions and changes of government and changes of rules all over the place. In the UK, you do have this growing amount of batteries there from vehicles and other things. Altilium are one of the leading companies there. They're being invested in by SQM and by Marubani. For their technology, you would presume to grow to other parts of the world. They have recovered graphite. Very, very high recoveries, by the way, about 99%. They have published that the anodes that they have tested and put under Minviro's LCAs show about 77% reduction on various anode types, you know, that they've tested. It's a working situation that can continue to grow.
They seemingly are, they just finished another funding round and they're in good shape. We're in good shape to have them as a provider of graphite material and turn it back into batteries and totally close the loop in places like the UK that has no graphite resources at all to use at the moment.
Okay, this one covers, this next question's been asked quite a few times by a number of different people. Forgive me for just choosing one, which hopefully covers all of it. Talga has secured all major permits. Can Mark confirm if any remaining formalities, like the government approval of the detailed mine plan, are affecting FID timing? Do offtake partners see this as a timing risk? Lots of questions around proposed timeframes and timelines.
Yeah, it was, I mean, obviously in the past, you know, admittedly we've been kicked around terribly by, you know, every time we've proposed timelines, we've almost never, we meet them eventually, but we've never, I think, met anything on time. Usually, because it's out of our hands, you would assume that these bureaucratic and administrative processes have got some sort of, you know, reasonable conclusion, and they have not. Now we're going the other way and saying, I don't want to give you a timeline because we don't know. If we're not told something to some high level of commercial confidence, you just cannot know. At the same time, that gives us opportunities to look at funding, different funding mechanisms.
For example, if we could get much more state aid, European money, like we did with the Innovation Grant for the EUR 70 million, if we could get more of the project funded that way, that would be worth delaying things for potentially. Yeah, it is true that it's not really a risk, but there's a series of boxes that need ticking, and it's very hard to push forward on things like commercial debt, for example, if that box isn't ticked yet. I would say it's not really holding up strategic partners. I would say that the strategic partners we're working with to come in, you know, and participate in the project with us are just extremely diligent and the sorts of people that spend a heck of a long time making decisions. You can sort of work out from that probably who that is.
Everything then will be subject to those final box tickings. In the meantime, we're investigating ways to build the project in a way that will be even cheaper and better for Talga and be even less risky in a way. Yes, the timeline is still being affected by access to the mine site because our current funding stack, as it were, was reliant on the whole thing. You had the mine and the refinery all being together in the one funding package. While you couldn't do the mine, you can't do the refinery because they were linked. Obviously, there's a risk also when, say, building the refinery, which is like EUR 300 million plus for the refinery, who wants to fund that when you can't guarantee what the startup date was for the concentrate supply.
Now we've got enough that you're getting very, very close to that point where you can actually commit to that based on the trial mine material, proving that you've got a solution for that and that the mine is close enough that you're going to get there. It hasn't happened quite yet. Everything is backing up, waiting for that last little piece to fall into place. At the same time, no one's hanging around. Everyone's flat out. All the finance team and the executive team in Europe are flat out working on new plans, new negotiations with the new opportunities that have arisen from the strategic project status, new opportunities that have arisen from all the defense funding that's happening, new financial instruments that are being opened up from the EU that include the state being able to invest as well.
All of those things are worth serious money and serious gains to Talga Group. If you can avoid, say, some equity funding or some expensive commercial debt funding and you can replace it with essentially grant funding and free money, like other people are getting in Australia and America, then that would be in our interest to do so, even from a timing perspective, especially now that you've got the opportunity to build other refineries in other parts of the world, being fed separately. There are still some holdups. I don't really see them as risks. It's just a very complex set of balls in the air juggling. Each time we're doing that, things get better and better. The more you delay, even during the delay, the opportunities have gotten better from the geopolitics and the strategic side and the defense side have been eventually been making things better.
Pricing's getting better and the companies are getting more understanding of what the heck they're building. The ones that were doing NMC and then changed to LFP are, well, now they're qualifying stuff for that. They're getting more advanced. They're all being able to make decisions again soon, but the last few years they really haven't. I know it's super frustrating, but it's being dealt with in as smart as possible ways for the betterment of the company. That will continue to happen that way.
Okay, last few questions off the Q&A chat. Would Talga be looking to license Talnode-R or partner or JV with other recyclers to build out plants in other parts of the world?
Yeah, can do. Right now we're talking to people more with complementary businesses that have got certain relationships with customers and government and maybe already existing recycling chains and things like that to cooperate and build something where we just do what we're good at. We will see. Currently, we're trying to petition ourselves off a little bit more and just find purely complementary positions, not necessarily, you know, sell 50% of the tech to one group that's also going to do something with it. I mean, those things might arise for the right price or something, but it's not the focus at the moment.
Now, turning to loyalty options, will the loyalty options strike date deadline be extended?
No, it can't be. As far as I know, it can't be. What's that, mid-September? Is it those ones we're talking about? I think so. Mid-next month, in about four weeks, the 55% options will be expiring, and no, that won't get delayed. I don't think it can be.
I think we'll finish off with this one. Is there a risk of another capital raise by dilution, or can we access the government grant of EUR 70 million to avoid it?
That is really two parts. Let me take the second part, which is that the €70 million grant is for the refinery build and it can only start being drawn down on when the balance of the financing for the refinery is in place. It is only when it is finally in place and you start build, then you can start drawing down on it. That is not something that can be used for corporate. We are applying for other funding for other state aid that is more short-term available and we hope to find out about that in the short term. We are certainly searching for other funding opportunities that have got nothing to do with the capital market.
Of course, the time-honored way of answering anything about when do you need a CAT rate, et cetera, is we are trying to, of course, avoid run-it-all costs for as long as possible and we will continue to do so. We always will be reviewing our capital needs as required. I cannot really say anything more than that. However, as a shareholder and as, you know, we have weathered some really horrible times over the last couple of years and particularly, you know, the last 12 months, we start to see some blue sky now. We want to push into that as far as we can. The capital markets are still, the equity markets are quite poor. It is nice to see a bit of application today, but we have got a lot more to do to get back to where we should be.
Until we do, we are not going to be comfortable about doing anything like that. No, we are working very hard on a whole range of other ways, everything from royalty streaming to early project stage finance to strategic investment from the off-takers to the equity partners on the project, the strategics, and particularly different forms of grant or state aid that may be available to be used, you know, that will have an impact corporately. Remember that you do not have to get something that is just for the company. You could, if you have something that is predominantly being worked on by the bulk of the company, that takes away most of the costs. The balance of, in our case, the last quarterly cash balance of $13 million can then drag out a lot longer.
At the same time, we recognize that, you know, in the last six months, you are always trailing behind whatever your spend rate was. You are continuously decreasing at a time like this to be more fiscally responsible. You don't see that the last quarter really has the burn from the previous quarter, etc. There is a decrease. That curve is flattening out a little bit. We're just always dedicated. When times are tough and we've got to do something, we always try and make it small. We try and make it as non-dilutive and everything as possible. When times are good, we do something bigger. So far, most people have participated at some point in a placement. We have traded above that in future and there have been opportunities.
I think based on the news you've seen today and hopefully what you've heard today, you can see the real blue sky potential of Talga Group, which is not just a single project. You can now see what we can, you know, have your own models based on our previous studies. You can now model up yourself on where that can go and what it can mean for total cash over time. I guess, you know, what else can you say as a public company in public? There's nothing else you can really say to it other than we manage as best as we can. If you don't like it, no one's forcing you to be a shareholder. Thank you. If you do like it and you like what we're doing, whether you like me or not, it doesn't really matter. You own as a Talga Group shareholder the resource.
The rocks in the ground aren't going anywhere. The tech you own isn't going anywhere. You own something that's been proven to be pretty real over time. I'd argue that we've again got exciting times coming up. I think, as I said earlier in the year, I said I haven't been this excited for several years because I think in the last several years you just saw this decrease, this terrible downward pressure from everything in the macro market. It wasn't really specific to graphite or anode. The battery demand's going like that and the pricing of everything's going down like that. Now it's all positive. You don't see, I don't see a headwind with what the world's doing right now. I think it's not just an opinion. You can see data to support that. Look forward to seeing you next time and being able to talk more details.
As Candice said, if you have more questions, send them into us. We'll do what we can. Obviously, there's a lot of restrictions, but hopefully we provide enough that you can go off and poke around and find some of those answers as well. It's just a pleasure as always to serve. Thank you everyone for attending today.
Thanks very much. Thanks. That's all we've got time for today. Thank you, Mark, for your presentation and time answering questions. As Mark said, if you have any more questions, feel free to get in contact via the email info@talgagroup.com. Keep an eye out for our next investor webinar next quarter. Thank you for attending. Bye.
Cheers all. Bye.