I will now welcome Mark Thompson, Managing Director of Talga Group. Mark, over to you.
Thanks, Candice. Yes, apologies everyone. We were literally starting the webinar as the alarms went off in our building. It is apparently a fire truck out the front. Yeah, I cannot see any smoke. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do except run around the corner to another office. Here we are. Let me get stuck into what has been going on. See if this can work. Basically, it has been an extremely big, well, quarter following six months where we were fairly quiet because we were flat out. I went overseas to personally be involved in everything and stayed out of there for three or four months until recently coming back. Yeah, during that time, we managed to start cranking out some of the things we needed to do. Let us commence here. I hope you can see that okay. Okay.
Just by way of introduction to those who might be newer shareholders, we produce high-performance lithium-ion battery anodes. We are not really doing bulk commoditized versions of battery materials anymore. I guess that was the focus of EV being the main driver of the markets a few years ago. These days, the market has come to us. It is now appreciating high power as well as high energy density. The focus has now become a huge growth in battery energy storage systems, which includes AI data centers, robotics, drones, all sorts of things. There is a massive growth in the performance markets now that have come to us. Also because we are 100% owned end-to-end, this is also very significant, in that our own tech IP means that we qualify for defense-grade applications as well.
Thus, our battery market targets, which, as I said, have been coming to us, includes these more high-performance areas of the market, which are both premium in performance and premium in price. FEOC, if you do not realize, is a foreign entity of concern. It is an American elite term. It is one of many that are used to filter out the existing supply chain that creates some strategic problems for supplier. Basically, the world over the last 30, 40 years of globalization handed nearly 100% of battery production to China.
Now that the governments of the world are realizing that as de-globalization breaks down and there's various geopolitical challenges and stresses, there are certainly new export controls that are kicking in from China itself. Some countries are either being cut off from suppliers or they're wanting to secure suppliers that are not necessarily Chinese, and they're having to build their supply chains from scratch. Talga is actually one of the few in the world that are a true end-to-complete supply chain is clean of technology, both in the process and the equipment itself. It's not just about the raw material, it's about what you use to make that downstream product actually work with as well. These are our trends at the moment. While it still does cover some of these, they tend to be performance EVs. Hybrids, which are high-power batteries.
Robotics, which are both warehouse robots as well as humanoids. AI/BESS is particular because AI algorithms have got very different high-level demands on power from battery supply. It's not just any old backup. Aerospace, which is everything from satellites to aircraft and unmanned vehicles of all types. We've got a sub on here because that's quite an interesting area for us. That actually includes a whole heap of anything with any form of propulsion that's electric and battery-powered or has batteries in the connections and, of course, drones of many, many, many different types. This isn't just military drones, this includes heavy-duty industrial drones. Let's look a snapshot of what's been happening because we've got a very, very advanced project, as you know, for a long time. What's been happening in particular in the last quarter?
I include in this really going back to the start of the year. We actually only got our mine permits finalized in February this year. Now all the key mine and refinery permits are in place. We've got our ore reserves defined. We've got a graphite stockpile. Interestingly, that stockpile, which came from the Niska part of the ore body, actually has got a head grade of 27% from a very high reconciliation compared to the ore reserve grade of around 23%-24%. We also have got plans for expansion. Importantly, during the last quarter, you've seen the deliveries of offtake material start from the Eva plant, but this is actually commercial to Nyobolt.
They're using this end product that we've sold in the market, and this is believed to be the first natural graphite anode that's ever been taken all the way from a mine through the anode, through the qualification process, and is actually now being delivered and working in customers' products. That's pretty significant because that essentially proves the entire project, the entire thesis of Talga. Can you mine it? Can you process it? Can you sell it? And does it work? That's all been answered, right? Not just by that one customer. There's others, too, that are not able to be made public, but that one was significant in that it could be made public. There's been further customers onboarded. Obviously, we've had a rash of, we call it the festival of LOIs.
The reality is we've been working with many Japanese customers and others for many years, and what might be a five-year offtake or, sorry, five-year qualification process, we might be three years or four years into that. The finalization of it is to go public with an LOI, which sets out the framework for the binding agreements coming on board. The customers continue to grow to fill that offtake stack, which we need to go onto financial investment decision. Engineering, extremely mature and developed, with Worley, with Sweco, with ABB and our other partners. Advancing to final engineering. That includes obviously updating it from the 2024 FEED study. You've got inflationary figures, you've got optimization of different gear. That all has to be taken into account.
One of the important things is the fact that we've now, I guess, optimized and perfected the selling of Talnode-C, the production of it. That work, both with our vendors and in our own facility, has very much de-risked the aspects of that. This isn't going from piloting to commercial. We're going from small-scale production to larger-scale production. That's a very different risk scenario. Excuse me, I've had the lurgy that's going around these few months in Perth anyway. Project funding continuing to advance. We have our existing facilities you know of with the lurgy We also are continuing to explore EU funding, and we've got a big priority at the moment on strategic partners. What does that mean? That means project-level equity.
We're looking for non-dilutive equity to explore how much of the balance between the debt, the grant funding, and equity project financing can be brought to bear so that there's minimal or even potentially no equity gap for Talga to have as a company. Put all together, by the end of this year, you're in a position to have the FID heading towards completion, where you've got your ramp-up of your production from the EVA plant, where you've got your FEED studies completed, where your customer offtakes, which I'll talk about later, are done. That all leads up to being able to have an FID and a construction start and ordering of early lead items from the triggering of the start of production finance. Some other things that have happened during this period. We've tripled our output from the EVA plant.
We have doubled our sales volumes. Now, right now, they're not massively significant in the scheme of the commercial scale of the company. However, it is important to see this real growth and to see real invoices and sales going on of these products. In fact, our qualification pipeline has jumped massively, not just in Japan, but around the world, in the U.S. as well as throughout Europe. Most of that news has been brought to bear. We've also cranked up expansion plan opportunities as well, both with the U.S. and throughout Europe. We've started deliveries to the U.S. customers. Overall, you've got a commercial progress has been actually pretty strongly underway during a time when the world is in a little turmoil. Both the equity markets and our customers themselves have got plans that are struggling all over the place.
We're always reacting to what the market's doing. We're always reacting to the customer's own ramp-up plans changing in the chemistries or the volumes. There's a lot of flexibility needed, unfortunately, to bring these things on. It's a very customized sort of market. Just a word about Nyobolt. I've talked already about how significant this is. Nyobolt are very much pioneers in fast charge technology. Talking to their CEO, Sai Shivareddy, over the years, I think he was really quite visionary in his view that instead of large mass, you could have smaller battery mass. Faster charging was an economic solution to many, many people's applications. Rather than going for energy density, going for power, going for speed. Therefore, for example, something like a warehouse robot could have a much higher upload time because its work to charge ratio has changed.
There's some very specific economic units behind this, which are not just the amount of power per unit of time. It also includes the amount of uptime you've got compared to the charge time, and the density and the volume of those robots needed to do those jobs. Obviously, probably if you've seen Nyobolt, you would have seen their little sports car that they did that goes from zero to 100 in about six minutes and goes from 10 to 80 in, I think, about four and a half minutes now. They're also expanding into data centers and many, many other things. We're not allowed to disclose exactly what we're being used for in their range, but you can see that they've got a large range. They have a really large valuation now. They're doing great things.
It was very important that they finished auditing and qualifying our material for production purposes, not for testing purposes and qualification. This is now in commercial production for them. Pretty exciting development, and we look forward to that expanding to the. We actually look forward to hopefully they will exceed their expectations, and their offtakes will grow even larger than currently planned. We also spent a lot of time in Japan. We've done many, many years of work with groups like Daikin and Mitsubishi and others across the place there. Obviously, people may remember back when we had Mitsui as partners in the project back around 2021. Today, a few things have happened.
Number one, the work with Talnode Materials in Japan has continued to mature, and the market demand in Japan has matured, meaning they've gone from straight EVs with some hybrid to lots of hybrid with a lot more performance materials. This is, how shall I put it? Obviously, there's things like robotics and drones. There's also potential dual-use applications, very high performance materials, and it includes AI data centers as well. A lot of EV capacity over there, the battery capacity is being repurposed into these new applications, which are a fast-growing and high demand for premium performance products with premium pricing.
What we've done is we've approached it as a whole, with a view to securing something that looks very similar to what you see the Japanese agencies invest in iron ore, copper, lead, zinc, fluorite, other projects around the world, tungsten, for example. That is that you have some Japanese customers that want your material to go into the Japanese supply chain. That is essentially collated and invested in by a trading house, whether it's Hanwha, Mitsui, Marubeni, that sort of company. They potentially can invest by themselves, or they can get funding support from JOGMEC, which is the Japanese government agency, which takes the risk and provides capital to their industry to invest in foreign operations to build supply chains into Japan. That's supported by METI, which is the government's financing arm of almost all industrial developments.
This is a well-known, well-formed format or framework of how companies work together. It's a very high-trust situation that's based on very carefully calibrated pieces of evidence that grow over time. We're very proud to have secured these non-binding LOIs, which do follow many years of work and have got fairly rapid targets to convert into binding and definitive agreements. With Daikin and with Mitsubishi, that's both on the material supply, that's purely offtake. With Hanwha, who's a AUD 17 billion a year revenue company, that is for both offtake for their customers, which are separate to Mitsubishi and Daikin, and it's also a potential investment into the project itself, as an equity partner. That is something we're also reviewing. FEED study was advanced. We mentioned this in the quarterly. A lot of the technical components have been completed.
There's some stakeholder engagements, IP risk management work, sort of some of the non-hard assets you might say, work still going on. We're supporting phased ramp-ups that we're looking at to bring the project in. The deliverables on the overall construction and site establishment is for the entire site, even though there may be phases of ramp-up within that, and that is to mitigate risk. What that means is, we're looking at the whole site. With the first lines, we're looking at building the first commercial lines to scale up from EVA plant to the first 5,000 tons, then 10,000 tons and 20,000 tons in stages. That's so that as each line gets bedded down, whatever you learn can be applied to the next line and the next line. Overall, the site gets developed.
The purification plant in particular gets developed. Our projects are doing great work with continuing to work on that when that's finished. That is a prerequisite alongside offtakes and finance for the FID, for the financial investment decision. I just want to mention something about other things we're doing. It is no secret, obviously, that back in also in February, we suffered a real blow in that we were expecting $100 million U.S.- level or EUR 100 million EU-l evel grant for Industriklivet 2 from the Swedish Energy Agency. Their budget got pulled for 2026, and that meant that grant disappeared. Following the loss of that, which was part of our program to ramp- up with during this year and part of our whole bunch of interrelated development activities, we had to roll with that punch.
One of the things we've done is review what other ways are available, what other financing options are available. We're still looking at developing in Sweden, doing everything there as planned. That includes bringing various partners. It also behooves us, shall we say, that we have been invited to look at other sites where governments are offering a lot more support, frankly, when it comes to subsidies and what would be really quite significant chunks of CapEx. This includes France, where they have, again, very well-established format for how to do that, from subsidies, tax credits, and finance guarantees. A lot of our battery customers in Europe are in France, most of which are not disclosed. Some of which are like Verkor and ACC. We did, during the quarter, go down and meet with government, and we actually started reviewing.
We'll continue to get more detail and review the exact opportunities that are there because France has got fairly low-cost power, they've got nuclear power, and they've got brownfield sites that are very advanced in their permitting stages or their potential. It is significant that we need to look at that for potential downstream to either potentially shift the downstream from Sweden if it economically makes sense, or to look at expanding down there, again, depending on what the situation is, continuing with Sweden or with the scale of the capital savings that can be had with the support of somewhere like France. Look, it's something that's potentially very viable. We haven't looked at it before seriously. We were just focusing purely on Sweden.
Now that some of the financing options that were supporting us there changed, it is only reasonable that we go and look at other options to weigh them up. These things are happening in parallel. They're not either/or, they're not binary situations. We certainly need to make you aware of that. That's why sometimes you'll see this picture of us here, with the local development authority looking at a site, a brownfield site in Dunkirk. Likewise, in the U.S., we have a strategy. It's pretty simple in the U.S. One is if the money's there, if there's enough support, there's definitely enough customers. If there's enough financial support, we're looking at building a duplicate of our Swedish anode plant in the U.S., which will be fed from graphite from Sweden, or recycled materials within the U.S.. That's a bit of a no-brainer.
We've done all the engineering and design. We have an established 20,000 ton per annum plant that can be built in modules of five, 10, 20, or of course, then go from 20, 40, 60 to 100. It makes sense to look at building something like that. Why? Because we're truly foreign entity of concern-free, meaning that our actual equipment and process technology is as well. We're not at risk when it comes to dual-use applications, which in America is the driving force right now. The driving force is for high-performance materials for potential dual-use, but it's high-performance applications across, again, AI data centers, robotics, drones, all those things.
That's why on the bottom right here we've got this picture of a BMW who just in the last few days announced that they're going to go ahead with building some of the new iX range there, which is really exciting. That's going to be in South Carolina, where our partners, United Catalyst, are operating. That's a pretty simple view of what's going on in the U.S. with us. As part of that, we're also looking at selling of stockpiles of ore from Sweden that they may wish to have in the U.S.. Sweden is a NATO country, so they can leave it in Sweden, or they can take it to the U.S.. Number three, we're interested in if the U.S. government wants to come into the project in Sweden directly.
We have current engagement with Department of War, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, and other groups, and we do have various applications in for various amounts of funds on both sides of the ocean, shall we say. That's being assisted by UCC. It's not our primary, it's not our only thing, as you can tell. We remain focused on Sweden, but the U.S. can either dovetail into it or provide secondary options for expansion. Along with those secondary options or potential dovetails in Europe, they're the same thing. You just see which one hatches first. Just a word about the market. Very interesting. For the first time in three years, synthetic graphite is now costing more than natural. Synthetic always costs more than natural.
It never was cheaper until the amount of dumping from China reached such plague proportions that basically has wiped out essentially everyone trying to build projects around the world for the last three years. Interestingly, with the Strait of Hormuz closure, increase in oil prices, there's been an absolute earthquake through the, n ot a literal one, but an economic one that has now influenced coke prices, which has influenced synthetic prices. Prices are on the way up. Of all battery metals, most battery components are on the way up, and graphite in particular is starting to re-normalize. You're seeing synthetic anode prices rise 25%, and you're seeing entire countries now being cut off. Japan is practically cut off now. BTR is struggling to get material in.
We've heard reports that they're struggling to get material into Europe because China's actually not allowing anything that may go to a dual-use customer. There is a decrease in exports to some parts of the world. People are trying to get around that by going to Indonesia and doing various things, and those things are being headed off by different countries in different ways. Benchmark recently said that anode demand will continue to triple, with graphite being far and away the dominant thing. People that worry about different chemistries like sodium and silicon and other things don't really need to be so worried. Almost every single projection of other anode chemistries coming in has been defeated over the years, and graphite still has a lot of optimization to go, frankly.
Talga's material proves that we're now absolutely killing synthetic in everything from performance in fast charge, but also even into long life now in some areas, which we'll hopefully get to talk about very soon. International Energy Agency says China's export controls is now risking over AUD 300 billion per year in downstream products. That's seen as a small amount. That's not the final products. That's in the direct battery products. Yeah. Growth in anodes is very strong, with graphite being the headline. Sodium has about one-third of the energy density, so that's pretty limited in what it can do. Silicon, very limited still by its applications. It's a very small amount. I think sodium was projected by Benchmark now to be probably less than 1% of the market by 2030- 2035. Basically, everything from that to solid state are all lagging years and years behind in reality.
They get talked up a lot by CATL to help give you all the heebie-jeebies. In reality, the graphite supply chain is massive. It's already gone from 50,000 tons a year to over 3 million tons a year inside of 10 years, almost none of that involving Western production. For 15 years now, almost no result outside China. It's not continuing. What's coming up before we get into question time? I haven't checked timing in general, but hopefully I'm going okay. Sales contracts and more offtakes. We continue. It's very important that we keep converting these non-bindings to bindings, and that's got a pretty tight schedule for these current ones in Japan. There's a whole bunch of non-public ones as well that are getting done, and the idea is that we need to meet a certain percentage.
In the past, we've talked about 70% of our total offtake requirements being needed for FID, and that's still about right. Co-investment, we need to get to the bottom of exactly what sort of equity financing stake in the project, what we can do to complete the financing stack. We certainly have no intention of doing massively dilutive things, so we're talking to partners that are interested in coming to the project with us as the primary way of getting it finished, and that includes state support. Very low cost to low cost support directly from government agencies. We've been extremely successful, and I must also pay kudos to Business Sweden for their work in assisting us in Japan in the last quarter.
It's been a massive effort, very successful at getting to the highest reaches of what we needed to do with forming partnerships in Japan, and UCC in America. It's worked very well. There is a range of bilateral partnerships that have been started, both between Japan and Sweden, between Sweden and France, and of course, there's some existing ones between Sweden and the EU and the U.S.. They're being explored for direct investment at government levels as well, due to the strategic nature of Talga's project. Of course, we're going to complete all the FEED work packages, and bundle that all up so that you can see the latest version of the scale-up, ramp-up of the anode project itself. We're also going to be showing you more technological things about our product.
We have some work underway to reveal more about the fast charge performance of our product and also the longevity of our products. Essentially, before I get to geeking out on technical things, our natural graphite really is truly unique in its crystallinity, in the spacing of the graphite layers and what it's able to do. We've seen some quite remarkable results with customers that we're hoping to bring out public very soon. That will also provide potential corporate activity to put a rocket up under the company. We're not just doing the project. We're trying to grow the company as well, obviously, not only rebuild a lot of value, but really accelerate what the value of the company is. Easy to say, I know.
The last six months were very quiet because we've actually focused on making the actual evidential studies and the work and the test work behind the scenes was getting absolutely nailed in the last six months. Now over the next six months, we get to actually reap all of this, pull it together and publish all this and show what it can do. We're actually pretty excited about it. When the world probably backs off from its various wars and equities and interest rates and everything else, that'll probably give a chance for us to breathe a little bit. Yeah, couldn't be more confident about what we've done. In a way, we have achieved already what we set out to do. We're doing it into this terrible market, but we do produce anode from our own mined material. It does work extremely well.
It sells at a very good price as per some of the studies, now it's all about finalizing the things like a normal project should, rather than going along the way without knowing some of these things. With that, I'll finish up and throw back to any questions we've got. I apologize if I've been a bit racy. It was an extraordinarily stressful, strange start to today's webinar. Hopefully, our building is still there when we return. Right now, I'd like to answer your questions.
Thanks, Mark. I'll now move to the Q&A portion of today's session. Once again, thank you to everyone who submitted a question ahead of time or through the Q&A function on Zoom. A lot of those questions were around the audio at the beginning. Apologies for that. Hopefully it won't come through on the recording. Some of those questions have been addressed through the presentation. Others that have been received beforehand have been consolidated into one question. We'll start with this one, Mark. Will there be an updated CapEx for the initial Luleå refinery build, including the first module announced at the finish of the FEED modules by September 30?
I should never talk about dates, but yeah, when it's appropriate, when we have the updated study numbers, and if that's the time when they'll have to come out as the study, then they'll be released together. Whether that's the end of September, that's a target for the end of the studies. I wouldn't say that's the target for when the report can be finalized and it can be published. The work will be done by then for sure on providing those results.
Okay. This is another one related to CapEx. Does there need to be an updated CapEx completed for initial Vittangi mine development?
Yeah. That'll be done at the same time. It's not just the anode plant, it is encompassing the mine development. There's a lot of different ways we're looking at cutting that. As I've mentioned earlier, with potential optimizations and there's potentially a lot of changes in the financing of the project, I expect we'll have a lot more clarity on potential partners in the project, which may change the capital cost quite a bit towards that. If it does get delayed at all, it'll only be for good reasons. Yeah, both will be done at around the same time.
Okay. Sorry. I'm working off one screen, which is bad for me at the moment. Talga has discussed keeping purification in Sweden while potentially moving coating lines abroad. Is a fully contained plant in Luleå with both purification and coating still the most likely path forward, or could extra international coating lines be added on top of it in the near term, driven by geopolitical tensions?
The purification plant is indeed separate to the anode production plant, where the coating and shaping takes place for the final anode product to be made. They are separable. The current plan is still to have them together on the Luleå site, which is fully permitted for that. There is definitely a higher hurdle to moving the purification plant, because wherever that goes, you would also need permitting for that chemical process, which is a higher hurdle than the anode plant. The anode plant is self-contained and doesn't really have any waste to it that's a problem. It's a series of ovens and machines that do various things, but doesn't have any massive chemistry in there. The anode production plant could indeed be expanded anywhere separately, obviously with the volumes matching up to the purification plant. The current plan is still to do everything in Sweden.
The options are that you could have separate anode plants only, and you expand the purification on that site in Sweden. All of these options are available, which are great options to have. I don't mean to confuse anything. If you're saying, can we build an anode plant somewhere else where the financing is really a massive saving on the anode plant? Yes. Could you shift the whole plant somewhere else where the financing's better? Yes, you can do that as well. That site right now is good to go. You do have the options, both.
I think in the past, I'll probably get in trouble saying this, I think in the past we looked at if you converted the whole site, which you would have to expand its current permit from 20-odd thousand tons of purification, the whole site could go up to 60,000 tons and beyond, I believe, in scale, in area, and probably beyond. The anode refinery would have to be somewhere else. Certainly, as expansions continue, it's unlikely that the Luleå site is big enough to handle something like 100,000 tons of anode. It may be that it's one or the other. The anode plant is there, or the purification plant is there. We do have these options. That's why it's also good to look at somewhere like France and other parts of Europe as well, as well as America. I hope that answered that.
Okay. Sorry, let me just find which screen this is. Should shareholders expect more binding post-qualification offtakes to be executed prior to FID? Or will the plant's remaining initial capacity largely be backed by conditional agreements that require full commercial qualification post-construction?
It's a bit tricky. It'll be depending on different customers for different volumes. Some will be, depending on their scale and where they're at in their process, some will be comfortable with conditional agreements where remember that this isn't just an EV plant now. You're not just a classic A, B, C, D type sample where your last one has to come from the fully commercial line. If you're doing a drone or a robot or something that's smaller, the commissioned line may be enough, or an expanded EV line may be enough to be the commercial supply, and then you're just scaling up. It depends. Certainly, whether it's binding with conditions or whether it's conditional on the commercial plant, they have to obviously stack up for all the financiers, including the European Investment Bank, for their debt component.
If it complies with them, it'll be complying with anyone. Yeah, it is expected that those will be complete to allow FID and that they are expected to be complete by the end of the year.
Okay, I'll take some from the chat now. What is your expected CapEx and OpEx inflation over the next three years? Example, are you observing labor and input cost increases beyond normal inflation?
It's a bit of obviously a moving target. Several years ago when we updated the original DFS to the 2024 FEED, I think we suffered there somewhere in the region of a total CapEx creep in the region of around 15%, of which we managed to decrease that through finding more optimizations in equipment as we continuously develop processes and products and continue to refine every little setting from how many minutes something is in one machine or how long something takes to go along one tube to another. While you always continue finding optimizations and trying to delay from that inflationary event, all I can say is that we will be doing our best. We don't have a target. Well, there will be inflationary targets that will be published as part of the FEED, the final FEED studies.
They'll be the ones that everyone agrees on in all the combination of the economics and the forecasters and the engineers, everyone getting together on it, what those impacts are. I don't have a number that I need or wish to share right now what that number is. Obviously, depending on the quarter, there's lots of changes. It also depends on your suppliers, who we're partnering with, and what sort of deals we can get. We're always looking at making savings there as well. There's the inflation rate, but it'll vary a lot. For example, it wasn't that long ago we were suffering massive inflation on steel. Steel prices and things were going crazy and then they've backed off. Copper was going very high and then it changed and got lower.
It sort of depends on the exact amount of different materials, and that's why it's not as simple as applying some sort of European or global inflation rate to just everything. The details for that will have to come out later. I'm sorry.
Okay, last two questions. Will the graphite tenement divestments in financial year 2026, I think it means the Q4 ones that we've just announced-
Yeah
Have they had any detrimental impact on life of mine and tonnage projections, especially if demand for Talga products expands in Japan and the U.S.?
No, that's why we call them non-core is because they don't contain resources at all or they have resources that we can get back in various ways. Essentially, we weren't dropping the whole project, so we retain all of the volumes and tons at Raitajärvi and Jalkunen. All we've done there is rationalize some of the tenements. That's all we've done. Also with the Aero Project as well. No, they'll have no impact on resources at all, or life of mine. That's just normal area management in that part of the world under those sorts of conditions.
Last question. Is a Japan anode plant being looked at?
Japan anode plant, I wouldn't say it's being looked at in so far as we're not reviewing sites and digging around in costs and looking at power supplies and wastewater treatments and things like that. However, it has come up as something we could potentially do that may be of interest. One of the factors that feeds into that, though, is that some of our partners and evolving partners that are not public yet do have some anode production facilities themselves that may be able to be co-opted or sites that can be repurposed. There's a lot of opportunity to do something there. Right now, we're not focusing on that. We're focused on what we can get in conjunction with Japan that affects Sweden. We don't necessarily would shift it to Japan.
Currently, our understanding is that power pricing is not that good there, that the amount of time taken to probably permit or do something new would be a bit of a hurdle. That's why, again, you'd look at co-opting other people's places, and that's very much a corporate activity rather than a pure engineering development activity. Yes, it has come up. We have thought of that. We have mentioned it several times, and there is some potential for us to look at production within Japan. We won't do it if it detracts too much from what our plans are from Europe. If that changes, then we'll let you know, similar to the way we're flagging you now about potential options in France, which followed potential options in the U.S..
Certainly, the options to do it there or other places like Poland or Hungary are also there for further downstream anode plants. It all just has to be weighed up about what's permitted and what the time frames are, and frankly, who's going to be paying the most for it. Yep, the potential's there. I wouldn't say we'd be looking at a greenfield site. It would be even a very high-level brownfield site if we look deeper at it, and we're not looking that deeply at the moment. I think, as you can tell, we've got more than enough on our plate.
Right. That's all we have time for today. Thank you, Mark, for your presentation and the time answering the questions. Thank you everyone for attending and for your patience and understanding on these unconventional sort of timings that we had today, and happenings in the background. Keep an eye out for our next investor webinar for Q1 2027. Thank you.
Thanks, everyone. Cheers.