Thank you to the organizers and, in fact, our dear sponsors. Let me introduce you to Talga, a company that I founded and I'm the Managing Director of. I gather the green button is for go, but it's not happening yet. Yeah. Hey, there we go. All right, intro. What we do is we're in the graphite space, but not just the raw materials. We make the downstream coated anode materials. We are a bit distinguished by having 100% of our own technology, so we don't have Chinese manufacturing technology and equipment in our process. We are validated with numerous customers globally that we've been working with, including having a binding offtake with NIBOLT, who specialize in fast charge out of the U.K.
We've been operating Europe's first and only coated anode plant now for three years at a demo scale, so bigger than pilot, and we're in the process of financial investment decision on the 20,000-tonne plant. We have a modular and scalable design of our product and our process technology, which allows us to look at processing in other parts of the world. Let me run you through that a little bit. On the summary, obviously the board there, market cap about AUD 200 million at today's share price, about AUD 0.44, recently as high as AUD 0.60. We're coming off, I guess, five-year lows, something like that. The critical minerals areas are bumping along.
I'm still one of the largest shareholders, and we have about 450 million shares on issue after being listed on the ASX for about 15 years, and we're more recently listed in the U.S. on the OTCQX as well. Why graphite? Why choose graphite? That was up to me. We were in gold when we started back in 2010, but in 2011, I noticed the growth in batteries. The volume of batteries was clearly going to be a long-term story of expansion and growth, and graphite is the least known and most unloved of the materials, and yet it's the largest mineral of batteries. It forms nearly 50% of the active material, so it's far and away the largest volume of mineral in a battery. The problem is it's got one of the worst supply chains.
While it sort of is not only involved in batteries, graphite for refractories, pouring steel, and in fact, indeed, what batteries do themselves, it is very critical to the functioning of almost everything in modern society: your phones, your laptops, increasingly your data centers, your energy backups at home, and industrially are all relying on it. Indeed, you could argue that many parts of the internet, defense, and robotics also rely on it. So graphite, while it is not a rare material on the Earth's crust, the downstream anode that it makes is extremely critical and has got real problems. It is the little peg that is propping up a lot of things in the world, and that is only just starting to be realized now. Indeed, the problem is it has a supply chain which is arguably worse than rare earths.
It's actually, according to this UBS research from a few days ago, the downstream production geographically is the most concentrated in the world. It's actually worse than rare earths. This is just one example of many where the supply chain is really, really badly focused. It's not only focused on China. The rest of the world's starting to see that it makes nothing. It makes nothing in Europe. It makes nothing in Australia. It makes nothing in America of this material c urrently, there's nothing that's commercially available outside that hasn't come through China. Even the Japanese and Korean material is actually being made from supplies from China or using Chinese technology.
China recently introduced new export permits on the materials and the equipment made for making anode, and that's causing a bit of, obviously, a shake-up to the US, who have responded with various tariffs, and they're also looking into dumping. They've already imposed pretty material tariffs that are coming in that will make material in the U.S. sell for considerably more than elsewhere in the world, and the European Union is bringing in new things as well. What Talga's doing is we've managed to build a totally vertically integrated from mine to anode refinery project in Sweden, which is underway. This is our fully permitted site consisting of a purification and shaping and coating plant to be built in Luleå, Sweden. North Sweden is abundant with hydropower, wind power, and we also have some nuclear power on the grid as well.
We have, combined with the high grade of the resource and the efficiencies of our product, we have about a world-leading, basically, LCA, so a life cycle assessment of our CO2 is one of the lowest in the world. We have plans to expand to over 100,000 tonnes being scoped, and the first 19,500 tonnes there covers about 16 GW of batteries per annum, and that will be that's under DFS, and the refinery site's fully permitted, ready to go. This is our upstream source of graphite. It's rather special. First of all, we're in Sweden, which is a NATO country, which is rather helpful these days, and also it's got a premium resource grade. The average in Africa is about 10%-11% at best. Australia, 7%-8%. Globally, well, China, 3%-4%. This is 24%.
More critically, all of the graphite flakes are battery-sized, so they're 100% battery-sized little flakes of graphite, and we're able to get those out with our process technology so it all becomes anode. We don't have any industrial products. We've already been mining, and we've stockpiled 27,000 tonnes of ore, which is available for our own downstream processes now, but it's also of potential value to go somewhere else in the world in the short term. On the downstream, we've developed our own technology, which uses a combination of Japanese, German, and Swedish machinery and engineering that we've adapted from different places. We have our own R&D team, which is in Cambridge in the U.K. We have our own processing metallurgical facility in Germany. We have a range of patents across 65 active cases, and critically, we've had some granted in the U.S. recently. We produce three sorts of products.
Talnode- C, which is made from our natural graphite, is a super fast-charging, high-power material that's really good in modern things like drones and robotics and AI data centers. Talnode- R is a recycled product, so that's where we take the graphite from recyclers, and we can basically reproduce EV and BESS-type material from that. We have a silicon graphene composite as well product, which we're developing. They're separate from the original plant you saw, which is for Talnode- C at the beginning of the presentation. Just a word on recycling. Just to be clear, we're not recycling batteries. Other people are doing that to extract the metals from them, but when they do that, they extract the metals. Graphite is not a metal, and the graphite basically piles up as a waste product.
We are offering to take that from them, and our technology enables that to be repurified, shaped, and coated back into anode again. This is a bit of a world first in the Western world, particularly doing it commercially, so this is pretty exciting. On the left here, you can see the graphite concentrate from a recycler, some of the before and after products, and it's already been piloted, and we are now looking at integrating it in modules into our plant in Sweden. It also provides other opportunities for global growth, obviously America.
I mean, there's no getting around the fact there's a dash for cash over there, but the fact is that this does offer some very big strategic opportunities for us, both from the point of view of being in a NATO-based country, having a high quality, like a top-tier one graphite asset of one of the critical minerals that they lack in America. The fact that we have 100% foreign entity of concern free processing technology is of basically military spec ability. This is me at the White House just a few weeks ago having one-on-ones with the Department of Energy Dominance and also the Security Council, so that was pretty exciting to discuss potential expansions there. We have appointed our initial partners there, United Catalyst Corporation, great people that are already leaders in recycling, so they have all the transport, logistics, permitting, a range of sites available.
They're in South Carolina, which is a state that offers wonderful incentives for operating in that part of the world. Yeah, we're really excited about seeing where this can go. We haven't formally announced our plans there. It's sort of all in development at the moment, but watch this space. Things are happening pretty fast, I would say there. Similar things are happening at a government level in the EU, but I would say a little bit slower. The EU is almost partitioning itself into a production hub with certain partners, and the U.S. and other parts of the world are trying to be, shall we say, a little bit more pure in their inputs, shall we say.
From a defense and strategic point of view, there is a huge alignment in working with a company like Talga that owns the technology for making anode all the way from the mine down to the final anode product that goes into a battery rather than just partway down that process. Just to wrap up here, I just want to talk about what is happening in the macro scene around graphite. First of all, when we talk about batteries growing larger, as I said, graphite has not been in the news. It has been very underrated for its importance. It is critical to many things, indeed. It is now being recognized as a critical mineral.
UBS recent work, amongst others, has it in the top two- three or four of critical minerals in the world, and it's up there with gallium as having the largest growth profile over the next four to five years. They predict graphite demand will grow by 350% in the next four- five years for graphite. That is from UBS's latest global research. For more details, take a look at some of the broker's research on us, which comes from Bell Potter, Euroz Hartleys, UBS, and also coming out soon from Zacks out of the U.S. To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that something we started working on over a decade ago because it was obvious the world needed a non-Chinese graphite supplier, at least an alternate Western anode supply.
There hasn't been one for many decades, and yet the world has just woken up to the fact that no graphite, no battery. It doesn't really matter how much lithium and cam and other materials you've got in the battery. If you don't have the graphite anode made, you actually can't make a battery currently. Now, no doubt a lot of you would like to talk to me about what about solid state, what about sodium ion, what about lithium sulfur and all these other things. Please come to the Talga booth afterwards, and I'll be happy to talk with you through all of these alternate technologies and where they're really at and what CATL's really doing. Of course, you won't believe me because I'm biased, but I am a world expert, so maybe some of it will rub off on you. Sorry, I've been going super quick.
It's not much time for me to explain this story, sorry. We also have a piece of drill core and some graphite from some other deposits and some batteries and things at our booth for you to come and play with and truly understand the material separately from understanding Talga. It would just behoove someone to think about what is actually powering all these little devices in your world. Come and learn something about the wonderful world of graphite and how it's essentially totally out of your control. The outlook is there is a stronger interest now. It's quite shocking to me when I was in the U.S. recently meeting defense primes, and in Europe as well, they thought that if they bought a battery in America or in Europe, that it was made there.
It was news to them that a battery is an assembly of different materials, of which 100% of the graphite is essentially from China, and they did not know about this until just the last six months. We continue our education programme around the world, waiting for everyone to wake up. Because it is not on the front cover of Newsweek or Bloomberg, and they are not called lithium-ion batteries, and it is not called rare earths, no one has actually thought about it. They are thinking about it now. For the first time, when I was actually at the White House, it was timely they admitted that they were working on a paper on what to do about graphite. This is in October 2025. It just occurred to everyone for the first time.
There was a part of the battery that was not lithium or rare earths involved, so that was good to see and hear. In some ways, we are just starting out now. Investors have been miles ahead of this strategically. Investors have been onto this for a long time. You think governments and auto companies and all these guys are strategically clever and across things? Unfortunately, you are miles ahead of them. They have absolutely no concept of anything. They have not made or manufactured anything in reality for several generations, and they have to relearn it all over. It is just starting out. You guys in this room, guys and gals, all understand at the moment somewhere around 2,000% more than those people that are reliant on making policy and making purchasing decisions. At least they are starting to get it now.
It's been a big year in 2025 for the rest of the world to wake up about the significance of graphite. I think 2026 is the big year when it goes a little bit more public, shall we say. What's coming up for us? On the back of this stronger interest, there are new markets opening up for us both geographically and in application. The increase in robotics, and I'm not talking about humanoid robots, which might freak you out, and you'll have a strong opinion on whether that's going to be a thing or not, but what I'm talking about is the little robots that crawl around in data centers picking up your novels and sending them to you via Amazon. Those robots are growing like crazy. There is an automotive theme behind industry, which is battery-driven today and the autonomy of that.
Obviously, EVs are still growing like crazy globally. What's interesting is the battery energy storage systems are growing at 3x's the speed of EVs. This has been surprising, even to me. I thought that all of the battery energy systems would consist of the leftover batteries from car manufacturing, that anything that didn't meet spec would just simply be taken out of the EV supply chain and put into battery storage systems. Actually, the growth has been so fast and continues to be growing exponentially that we've had to build new factories for even more battery capacity for that. The numbers are just absolutely ginormous, and it's barely gotten started.
I mean, in Australia, you're so far away from where all this growth is happening, but the growth here is very good to see, but it really doesn't relate to what's happening in the rest of the world. The volumes are significant. Data centres are interesting too because AI have got longer queries and stresses that can't be broken compared to a backup of, say, your kid's photos in Facebook. When you have an AI algo that's running for about, say, a minute, you don't want to break that. The backup can't be a diesel genset. It's got to be a battery, but it can't just be any battery. It's got to be a fast charge battery, something that can respond quickly, but it's got to have a long cycle life separate to a capacitor. There are new zones opening up for us. It's not just EVs.
It's actually most of the rest of the market. We focus on high-performance materials that get premium prices in these premium markets. Catalyst for us coming up is mostly all the usual things around significant partnerships coming in, new strategic investors and partners coming into the project in Sweden, both at a government level and commercial level, partnerships and money coming back into Europe, and also for expansions into the U.S. Potentially, expansions into Australia are also being discussed in various ways. Predominantly, the EU and the U.S. markets continue to have no commercial supply of anode, and that obviously has to be solved. Talga is able to solve it. Thanks for listening today, and yeah, look forward to catching up with you at the booth afterwards. Cheers.