Hello, and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you joined us for our Australian Rare earths and Critical Minerals Conference. Our next presentation is from Talga Group. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking "Book a Meeting" in the top toolbar. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Mark Thompson. He's the Managing Director of Talga Group, which trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol TLGRF and on the ASX under the symbol TLG. Welcome back, Mark.
Thanks, John. Welcome, everyone, to this presentation of Talga, which I will be introducing you to the company and running you through a very brief summary of what we're doing and also particularly how it applies into the developments in the American markets. First of all, a summary of what is unique about Talga. One thing, amongst other people involved in the graphite supply chain, is that we make the final Coated Anode material. We don't just make raw graphite flakes or a partially processed downstream product. We actually do the full downstream. It is totally connected from mine or recycled material all the way into final Coated Anode material selling directly to battery makers. That technology is all our own.
The processing equipment and technology behind that is not licensed, and it does not use countries that fall under the Foreign Entity of Concern and other USA stipulations regarding production. We're not sure, but we are fairly sure that we're one of the, if not the only, Western-based graphite Anode making company that has its own entirely FEOC and PFE compliant supply chain production. We are validated already. We're qualified with multiple clients and customers, including Northvolt, who we have a binding offtake with, others that are in a negotiation process. The point being here that we are not aspiring to do it. We've actually been creating Anode now out of Europe for the last three years,
and we're coming to the end of that and have completed qualification process with many companies who are in negotiations with about ongoing customer relationships. We have plans for an initial just under 20,000 tons per Anode of Anode production per year, that is construction ready to go pending FID. We have a 100% owned graphite source in our mine, which is quite special in the world in that it's number two in the world for grade of overall JORC or any NI 43-101 resource. It's around 24% grade as an ore reserve, but it's also the largest graphite resource in Europe and uniquely has 100% battery size flake, which means that all of our material goes into the battery and other advanced material markets that we so choose.
We don't have to make industrial products or have any sort of basket price of other materials. Our production technology is modular and scalable, meaning we can add on expansion stages within North Sweden where we're currently located, but also look at opportunities to build new construction in other countries like America and other parts of the world in relation to using feedstocks that also come from recycled materials separate from the mine concentrate. Altogether, that is an entire resource and technology platform, 100% owned, intellectual property inside, already been operating. It's at an advanced stage, ready to build at commercial scale, and is in fact operating at just slightly under a pre-commercial scale at the moment.
Why are we interested in graphite? I started Talga actually in 2010. We listed on the Australian Stock Exchange then. In 2011, we started looking at graphite because of the growth of batteries. Graphite is far and away the largest volume and easily the least well-known mineral of battery supply chain. It is truly the weak link of the battery supply chain. While lithium and cobalt and nickel and many other metals get all of the media action about it and sometimes government action as well, this is now it's becoming recognized that the graphite is not only underlaying the entire current Lithium-ion battery supply chain across all different chemistries, but there are some major problems with that supply chain.
What we saw was massively fast growth. We saw concentration of the production predominantly in Asia and that there must be worse supplies. That's why we moved into graphite. Indeed, we've been proven correct insofar as that the volume of demand has been going through the roof, but it still remains a little bit under the radar. It's looking pretty good in the near future for that. This is the main problem, that the supply chain for it is worse than Rare earths, meaning that the refining capacity, the actual production of the final product, is more concentrated in China than even the Rare earths industry. Of all of the critical materials that exist, whether it's gallium or whether it's Rare earths or whether it's lithium or cobalt, in fact, the number one most stacked supply is coming via China in its entirety.
That makes obviously for a huge gradient of pressure to not only develop new projects, but for Western companies and others and governments to be involved. That's because the geopolitical drivers have changed. It's fair to say that for 400 years, graphite production went from very local production, originally in the U.K., in England, and then obviously different parts of the world, in China, in places like Mozambique, up in Portugal. There's even a small deposit in Montana. There's tiny little rich veins everywhere, particularly in Sri Lanka. You saw the industry sort of move over hundreds of years in different little sites. More recently, when China opened up in the mid-1990s, they dumped a lot of production around the world and pretty much the entire non-Chinese world shut down.
It's never really recovered, to be honest. There hasn't been very much production, predominantly from Brazil, a bit from Madagascar and India, of course, but these were raw materials. They're not the downstream produced materials. What has happened is that even Japan and Korea, who were at the forefront of growth of lithium-ion batteries, they started producing Coated Anode material for batteries, but they were actually getting—they eventually shifted their raw material suppliers to China. They are actually getting just purified and shaped material. Eventually, you have ended up with both natural and artificial graphite being predominantly from China to the point where it is causing major stress.
What has happened recently is a change in that China has introduced export controls. You might have heard about them if you follow other metals in the world, like things like gallium or antimony and a whole bunch of other critical materials, including, of course, the famous Rare earths. These restrictions now apply to graphite as well. This includes not just the raw material, but also the production. This is the machineries that can make Anode. Those are now being restricted at the same time. Now, some of these for natural graphite were started restrictions about two years ago. New ones were just introduced a few weeks ago for synthetic and artificial graphites.
These have now been given a stay of about one year depending on how things continue to pan out on Trump and tariffs and the relationship with China. Clearly, by graphite being involved in that process, it's showing its teeth, as it were, and the sensitivity to it is actually very high. The products themselves are not necessarily highly priced. It can range in price anywhere from raw materials being as low as $300, $400, $500 a ton, up to very, when you've value-added and made Coated Anode materials, if they're very high performance specialist markets, you can get $12,000 and upwards per ton. There is a really, really big range in the value-add.
That might not sound much per ton to those of you that are working in the sort of gallium, antimony, and other rare sort of metal space. However, the problem is that no graphite, no batteries. It is very binary in its effect. If you do not have any, then you have no Lithium-ion battery of any commercial scale whatsoever right now that is ready to go. Your data backups and your phones and your laptops and your entire modern industry then start collapsing and so far as that you cannot actually feed that beast. You have no supply whatsoever now outside of the Chinese supply chain or technology for that supply chain.
That is why the E.U. and the U.S. have introduced new rules around it. They are trying to both counter dumping from China in the U.S., but they are also trying to stimulate the production of materials strategically to make things more secure in the U.S. In Europe, they have taken less of a financial route, more of a regulatory route, where they have brought in local rules like you have to have 10% of a product that has to have been the materials been mined and extracted or up to 40% of that material having been processed within the E.U. Right now, that has not managed to create a lot of new supply in Europe. In fact, there has been nothing new built whatsoever.
Talga is one of the most advanced and awaits some key funding parts to its story. In the U.S., there is a faster movement towards localization and strategic investment, which has now opened up to Talga as well. When it comes to the Chinese market, it is a bit interesting. China now produces in excess of 90% of the world's batteries, and that includes a huge amount of domestic demand for EVs and for solar backups and for data center backups and the grid normalization, shall we say, or grid saving. This is adding up to you have vehicles growing, you have battery energy storage systems going like crazy, and the biggest volume part of that entire story globally is actually graphite.
It's got the largest volume required for that market, and yet there's been no new supply brought on of commercial Anode production at scale anywhere in the world. It's still the graphite dumping from China and the lack of investment from both the equity markets and the government support have led to this rather extreme situation. This is a lucky band that's or an elastic band that's drawn very, very tight waiting to snap back. One of the drivers of that is the defense side. Now, it's not necessarily the world's largest market, but it's still very, very significant in the way it makes things get moving. Today's military and defense operations lean on batteries harder than ever before.
There's more drones now, unmanned vehicles, robotics, and huge amounts of batteries, up to 70 individual batteries on a person, field, field operative. When it comes to night vision goggles to laser sights, you name it, all this stuff is now battery driven. Quite a lot of that is rechargeable batteries. Between that and singular batteries, there is a huge issue if you do not have some control over that supply chain. It is only in the last six months that the defense primes are learning this. Quite shockingly, it has only just occurred to them that this is the situation. They thought that batteries were coming from wherever they buy them from. They did not understand that they were filled with all these materials that are coming from either entities of concern or can be turned off
like a tap overnight, zero then available to defense of qualifying in the battery supply chain. Additionally, there is powdered graphite, which is involved in armaments and other materials that get used in defense. That's why on the right here, you can see this table that the Hague Institute identified graphite as number one across a whole range of defense applications. NATO itself has reported that battery supply chains are a critical vulnerability, predominantly with graphite being as number one. It's interesting that while there's this logical progression of awareness around graphite and its role, because it's not the most glamorous of the critical minerals and because it's not actually a metal, it's a non-metal, but it's highly conductive
And it's poorly understood what its role is by people outside the industry, it's been misidentified as being unimportant, and that's turned around very, very quickly. I'll talk about that a little bit later. They're the problems, okay? Really concentrated supply chain, stupidly concentrated downstream, much worse supply chain than Rare earths, critical material in reality, not just another element on the periodic table that someone's worried about small volumes for some particular purpose. It's actually really large volumes across lots of different serious applications. It's actually truly the critical material, to be honest, compared to almost anything. What are we doing about it? Talga is going to build an Anode production site.
We're going to start producing larger amounts of Anode in Sweden. Down in the bottom left of this corner, you can see it. That's a map of Sweden for those who don't know what it looks like. Up in the north of Sweden, there's a port town called Luleå. It has universities. It has a very vibrant community. It also has a lot of downstream production facilities already from the iron ore industry. It's got a vibrant new Green steel industry arising here. You can see imports of coal and other materials coming in and meeting iron ore that's coming down from northern Sweden and being pelletized and smelted into steel, SSAB, some of the finest steel in the world and has ever been made, I would say, if you get to play with some of that stuff.
This is premium quality material. At the top right, you've got a new industrial area that's been developed by the local government, and Talga has become one of its first tenants. We have a site there that's cleared and fenced, and we've been installing things like all the drainage and the power connections and getting all ready. That is ready to build. It's a fully permitted chemical use site. This is acids and alkalines. This is a pretty major development in that we've been able to get that site fully permitted, as well as upstream at the mine as well. What does that look like? It is a factory that looks like this. On the right-hand side, the concentrate will come down from the mine in this case or from recycled masses and goes into a purification plant.
It is raised there to battery grade, which is in excess of 99.95% graphite content. It goes through those blue roofed lines on the left. They are individual modular lines of Anode shaping and coating equipment. From that comes a powder, very small, very fine powder that looks similar to a pharmaceutical or food-grade powder. It is highly engineered graphite particles with a little hard coating on them, and that goes directly to battery manufacturers. We're proposing just under 20,000 tons of Anode production per year, which is enough for about 16 GW of batteries per year. This is all running on hydropower, and there's even some nuclear on the grid as well.
There's quite a lot of wind as well. It's 100% sustainable energy, and it's extremely low-cost energy. That's part of the economic reason why we can produce competitively with China, with that super high-grade ore body, 100% flexize, very low-cost power, and hyper-efficient new technology we've brought into the process. This is fully permitted and construction ready, and nearby we're already producing at a sub-commercial scale ready to scale up to this. Now just jumping upstream to where our natural graphite source is, just pointing out that if you've forgotten already, Sweden is a NATO member, so that's been a good development. The U.S. and Sweden have got good relations.
In fact, a couple of months ago, we were actually chosen to be part of a NATO exercise, Northern Pine, which is where we were actually involved in testing the resilience of the local production supply chain to continue to function under various scenarios. That was really interesting for us and also shows our strategic importance and some of our relationships that we do have into our friends across the Atlantic. Probably importantly is, as you can see on the left, this natural graphite ore body is very special. It's very unique. It's at surface. It gets up to 100 meters wide. At grades, we have individual grades up as high as 50%. It averages around 24%. Importantly, all the flakes are very, very similar size.
This has a huge amount of positive knock-on effects in the way you can optimize your metallurgical processing, but also the batteries you produce. It's particularly good at making fast-charge batteries for reasons that hopefully we can expand on actually over the next few weeks more technically. We've already been mining to an extent and built stockpiles of 27,000 tons. We use these stockpiles to toll mill into a concentrate at the moment and feed our existing Anode plant for the qualification process for customers. This does present actually a strategic opportunity, if required, for this material to go elsewhere in the world, also for us to commission the plant on without any further mining.
They do not necessarily have to dovetail the mine and the downstream Anode refinery together. Of course, you do financially and in your production ramp-ups, but you don't necessarily have to do it from the point of view of the entire project working together. Let's just summarize what that looks like then, okay? It's just to try and be clear. We own the graphite supply from our own graphite mine, which is rather exceptional. The material, the flake size, the batteries it makes. We can also get material that's supplied or purchased from Black mass recyclers. We can take either of them. We put it into our Anode production technology, which is a purification stage for all that material.
Then we shape all that material and we coat all that material so it's ready to sell, in this case, as our trademarked Anode product, which we call Talga Mode. We have Talga Mode C, we have Talga Mode R, we have Talga Mode SI. We have different Talga Mode designations for different products for different applications. Our customers are not necessarily trading companies, although we do not mind, of course, talking to them, especially about strategic investments. However, the customer for us is actually battery-making companies, so the ones that make battery cells, not packs. This means that we are dealing directly with the Panasonics and ATL and CATLs and
Nyobolt and everyone in the world that actually makes cells for any particular application, Saft or Fam or LG or Samsung or whoever you like. We may also work with downstream, like the car manufacturers or the product manufacturers who are the end users of that. They may get involved. Obviously, everyone's familiar with what that looks like in an EV situation. For Battery energy storage systems, the best, which is the fastest growing market in the world, you tend to work directly with the battery manufacturer, but you can also do some more as well. Our data center backups for that grid is a booming industry. Robotics and defense are of high interest to us because our material is really good at fast charge,
Which suits heavy workload material. When you need a lot of power and you need really ultra-fast charge, our material is very good for that. We have technologies as well as material that particularly suit those applications, which means we can get premium pricing. There is lower volumes than the EV and the best markets, but as I said, they are premium markets, and they have got a very good fit with our materials and with our technologies. We are truly fully integrated. We do not do the raw materials. We can, but we choose not to because they are relatively low margin. While this seems ambitious, what you see in front of you, we have actually already been doing it for many years.
We developed our first Anode project in 2018 or the first product in 2018. We were publishing studies and testing with customers already by 2019, 2020. Here we are these years later, fully qualified, and some of our materials are out there in the market, in products at the moment, working under confidential agreements, starting with small immaterial amounts of income, but very material point of view from testing for the customers. That, in essence, is what we represent, is one of potentially the most significant. Over time, I think we'll scale up and be one of the largest Anode production companies in the world. That's our goal. Along that pathway, it is not only strategically improved, but it is much more sustainable.
The high grade of the deposit, the sustainable power supply, the logistics, and easy supply chains to our customers mean that our actual emissions and our sustainability is our emissions are very low, sustainability is very high. We have a very, very small footprint from the mine and obviously a very small footprint regarding Black mass and regarding recycling. We make it into high-performance products that suit many of the world's applications. Yeah, that's us in totality. I just want to zoom in on recycling for a second in that we're not proposing recycling of battery materials. Other people do that.
We have partners that are public like Altilium and Aurubis, and they're involved in getting metals out of recycled batteries and production scrap. They then, if they so choose, they make a graphite concentrate from their metal recoveries. We are a customer for that, essentially a waste product from battery recyclers. We have got this patented technology to repurify and reshape and recut that material back into viable Anode again. In fact, surprisingly high-performance Anode. This produces a new opportunity. One is that we can add modules to produce that material specifically to our stage one production, potentially expanding the scale of that. That is something we're looking at very hard right now.
We could add some, get some quick gains in volume outputs there that we're looking at. Secondly, it produces the opportunity to expand to other countries. Of course, initially, we're looking very hard at the USA. What that would look like is basically on this table where you don't have a mine and a concentrator to make your concentrate. You are getting the concentrate instead from Black mass suppliers that are already in the battery recycling chain there. By replicating our downstream Anode refinery, which looks exactly the same, by replicating the entire thing and putting it somewhere like in East America, for example, you would be able to start producing Anode
There from those recycled feedstocks and potentially bringing material over from Sweden to there, if required as well, for scale-ups and potentially using other people's material as well, I guess, subject to testing that other material could go in there as well. The point is that Talga is one of the few people that have got a viable, efficient, low-cost, and highly successful Anode production downstream plant that can have different feedstocks coming into it now. We recently were over there on government-funded missions. As part of that, we've been very happy to catch up with United Catalyst Corporation. We've announced that we've entered into an initial partnership with them, which we would like to upscale somewhat.
We've really enjoyed our relationship so far. United Catalyst Corporation are quite remarkable in that really very, very successful and quality recycling company with over 30 years of experience in recycling for platinoids, including rhodium, and a whole bunch of other recycling tech and development expertise that are relevant to what we do. In addition to being extremely high-integrity people and staff and as a company, they have very good contacts into the U.S. Department of Commerce and other U.S. government groups. As you can see here in this picture, just a few, feels like a few weeks ago, we were up together at the White House having one-on-ones
with significant groups within the Trump administration about opportunities that we can provide. What that would look like somewhat is this, which is a very simple, just the purification, shaping, and coating part of our process and the inputs coming from Black mass recyclers and from Gigafactory scrap. That would be coming directly from companies that are making Anodes or making, sorry, making batteries in that area. I was checking the timing. For example, if you've got battery makers like LG or the Toyota joint venture and others that are making batteries, when they're making those batteries, they have scrap coming off the edge. They also scrap batteries that aren't up to spec or during the ramp-up of a project.
That material is gathered by battery recyclers, and they make that black mass that they're interested in for their metals. They can take a graphite cone out of that and supply it to us, and we will turn it back into Anode available for a USA battery manufacturer. This gives you high circularity, and it gives you strategic strength. Everything that's been coming into the country just stays there, and you can introduce new materials from wherever you want, but you do have this opportunity to have this highly high-performance product that's entirely made in-house within the USA.
Of course, this could also apply to other parts of Europe, could apply to Australia, could apply to different parts of Asia, can apply to the Middle East, for example. The critical part is really this bit you're looking at in the middle is the core of Talga's technology, which is of more value than is probably realized. You might say, "Well, where are we going to go? How advanced is this?" Watch this space, but we are looking at South Carolina. We did do a review of all sides of the country over the last few years, going back to the Biden administration and the IRA funding, but we're very interested. South Carolina is looking extremely competitive. It has some fantastic tax credits and incentive packages available. It's very close to a lot of customers that we already have relations with.
There's a lot of development going on around there, and there's that local as well as the federal potential. It's in what's being called the battery belt now through the Midwest. It's ocean-facing, so back to Europe, so anything coming over that way. Yeah, it's got some really good sites and really pretty good, looks like pretty competitive power costs. We're looking at individual sites and things in conjunction with our partners there, of which we hope to grow. We're having a good hard look. There, I'll leave it. Thank you, John, and thank you, team. Looks like there's lots of questions coming in, a lot of questions, a lot of detailed questions. I see from a timing point of view, I've only got a couple of minutes left.
What I would say is that rather than try and get to those, I will address those in one-on-ones with you separately. Please continue sending in questions from this, and yeah, we will get back to you individually. Thanks very much.