Good morning and welcome to the Euro Manganese Investor Briefing. I'm Jane Morgan, Investor and Media Relations Manager, and today I am joined by President and CEO Martina Blahova and industry expert Andrew Zemek, who will be providing a company and market update, respectively, as it relates to Euro Manganese, followed by a Q&A session. Good morning.
Good morning, Jane.
Martina, I might just hand to you first up to provide a company update.
Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time today for this webinar. You will hear from Andrew high-purity manganese is already used in many EV batteries today and how it is going to play even a more prominent role in the future. As the EV space grows and as the energy storage markets are evolving, and also due to its ability to improve battery efficiency, decrease costs, and how it is used in the defense sector. High-purity manganese, most of it, over 90%, is processed in China, and this poses high technology and supply chain risks, which is why our project is so important. Euro Manganese is developing the Chvaletice Manganese project in the Czech Republic. As a member of the EU, the Czech Republic is offering a stable and business-friendly environment, and that is where we have been operating in the last close to 10 years.
We have the only sizable manganese deposit in Europe, and our project is the only integrated one, which means that the deposit and the processing facility are in the same location. Additionally, this deposit is hosted in historic tailings, so by reprocessing these tailings, we also are reclaiming the site, and it has significant ESG benefits. The two battery-grade products that we will be processing and producing in our plant are high-purity manganese metal, and then partially this will be converted high-purity manganese sulphate. Going through this metal route gives us the optionality to supply the metal and the sulphate market, but also supply customers who will be producing other feedstocks for the batteries as the cathode technologies and chemistries evolve. Over the last quite a few years now, we have achieved several significant milestones at Chvaletice.
We have obtained the Environmental Impact Assessment approval in March 2024, and we have also obtained the permit to extract the mineral from the deposit. This permit is not time-restrained, and these two permits are the most important in the permitting process of the project. We have secured other permits that preceded the EIA and the extraction permit, and also we're working on the permits that are following these two. The project was selected as a strategic project under the EU Critical Raw Materials Act earlier this year, and also as a strategic deposit by the Czech government. That means that permitting and some funding options are available to us, faster permitting and some financing options. We will see how that translates into real action and benefits, but it's definitely a great start. By now, we have five term sheets with potential customers. Those are non-binding.
However, they are for both the metal and the sulphate, and we have already delivered quite a few samples to potential customers for testing. One of the major milestones we achieved is the commissioning and the operation of our demonstration plant at site. This is quite a sizable demonstration plant. It's hosted in two sizable buildings. We have produced both products on spec in the plant, the metal and the sulphate. By doing that, we have proven the flowsheet that we laid out in the 2022 feasibility study. We have produced bulk samples. Smaller samples are now delivered to potential customers. We have some still available. We have obtained quite a bit of learnings and experience with the production, with the whole process. By doing that, we have extracted the know-how of this processing from China, and we have made it EU and Czech Republic norms compliant.
What the demonstration plant showed us is that there are certain improvements, real or potential, for efficiencies, and we are now running a program that is focusing on these efficiencies and optimization of the process. The main focus is on improved recoveries, on optimizing the equipment sizing and the layout of the plant, on reduced reagents and consumables, and enhanced process controls. As we are progressing through this work, there are implications to the future commercial plant. In the next few months, as we are completing this internal piece of work with the help of external engineers, we will be making decisions on the next phase of the development of the project, including the potential updates of some of the technical studies and the sizing of the commercial plant. I'm happy to have Andrew Zemek today on the call.
He has been the manganese market analyst for the past seven years, and he works with the International Manganese Institute, where he also held the function of Deputy Chairman of the high-purity manganese Committee. I will now hand it over to Andrew to talk about high-purity manganese market.
Thank you very much, Martina. Welcome, everybody. I understand we have quite a following today. I will try to be brief, which I always have difficulty with because there is so much to say. By means of introduction, my background is in metals and mining, 35 years in the sector, of which the last seven years I spent almost exclusively on manganese in batteries. My other metal was molybdenum, but that was about 20% of my time, and about 80% of my time was essentially manganese in batteries. I am here today to talk about the market and its many, many facets. Slides will be available afterwards, so you do not have to keep snapping or whatever, making notes. You will get them. I understand the session is also recorded, so we will have this as well. Without further ado, let me start.
Screen sharing, and then we'll take it from there. Just one second. Can you confirm, Jane?
Yes, all good to go. Thanks, Andrew.
All good to go. Okay, fine. Okay, let's start with the manganese as a metal and the manganese market in general, and then we will switch on to the battery business and the main products of the Chvaletice plant of Euro Manganese and where it's going, etc. What is manganese? It's essentially a steel alloying metal. It's no accident that I'm starting with the periodic table. As you can see, it's sitting next to iron, next to chromium, cobalt, nickel, and molybdenum. That's obviously important for the steel alloying role of it, but it's also important for batteries. In particular, its neighborhood to iron because it can replace iron in LFP batteries. That's one of the big themes in the battery industry today, the replacement of iron with manganese in LFP batteries, which last year accounted for 70% of all batteries produced in China.
It's a very important thing. About 90% of manganese mined annually globally is used in steelmaking, and the remaining 10% in other applications, of which only about 1% is used in rechargeable batteries. From the point of view of the whole market, it's a niche. It's a small dark corner of the market, but it's extremely dynamic and very interesting. Manganese is mined in about 30 countries, but the first four producers account for about 80% of global production. You can see it on the map. Number one is South Africa, number two Gabon, number three Australia, then Ghana, and so on, as you can see on the slide. The map is showing you the ranking of the last 10 years. The bar chart on the right is showing you the ranking in 2024.
We had a little bit of slippage of Australia to the number four place because of the typhoon damage of one of the largest manganese mines in the world belonging to South32, and that knocked down some production. The production of about 20 million tons, which is comparable to production of copper or aluminum, that's expressed in tons of metal contained, not the ore. The ore is very variable. It can be from something like 57% to 55% manganese, typically about 38%. That's the kind of industry standard. Fluctuating around 20 million tons annually. We have plenty of resources for future mining. In fact, we have enough deposits already discovered to last for about 300 years at the current rate of mining. We do not need to find any new discoveries. The mining is not an issue.
There are, of course, so-called manganese nodules at the bottom of the sea, which some people want to mine. They are at 4,000 m-6,000 m below sea level. It is not an easy mining. It may or may not happen. The message from this slide is we have enough deposits. That is not an issue. The issue is processing. As I said, as China is one of the largest producers of steel in the world, no wonder that they are also the largest consumer of manganese and also the largest importer because they themselves produce very little, only about 4% of global production. They import 16 x more than they mine, and they consume it all, and they make it into other products and then export it. The breakdown of the market is as follows: about 91% of total manganese mined is consumed.
As ferroalloys in silicon manganese and ferro manganese, which is subsequently used in carbon steel, stainless steel, and so on. Not surprisingly, China is again dominant here. Only 4% of global mining production, but 61% of ferroalloy production is happening in China. Within the remaining 9%-10%, which is not going to non-steel applications, China is simply huge. It is about 95% of processing of manganese for other products than ferroalloys is happening in China. We will delve into it in a minute in greater detail. When it comes to the so-called battery metals, I say so-called because graphite, of course, is not a metal, but it is mentioned in the same breath as other metals. Manganese is particularly disadvantaged from that point of view. As you can see on this slide, in this slide, 95% of manganese, which is required for batteries, is processed currently in China.
There is a huge need for diversification and development of non-Chinese projects for reasons essentially of security of supply. It's bad in other metals too, but particularly in manganese, as you can see here. I understand we have plenty of retail investors on this call, and not all of you are probably battery experts and so on. A very quick one-minute, two-minute overview of the battery market as a whole so you understand better the rest of the presentation and how it fits with the Euro Manganese project and future developments in this industry. We essentially talk about two types of batteries: primary batteries and secondary batteries. Primary batteries are the ones which you throw away. They are non-rechargeable. They are your usual AAs, AAAs, and so on. They consume also a lot of manganese.
In fact, half of manganese consumed in batteries of any kind is used in primary batteries. We have secondary batteries, and they essentially break into about three groups. It is your good old lead-acid battery, which you have in your car, unless your car is electric. Even in the electric car, you will find a small lead-acid battery, 12-volt battery. You have the elephant in the room, which are the lithium-ion batteries. I will say more about them in a minute. Finally, we have the emerging new competitor to lithium-ion batteries called sodium-ion batteries. You can find them under different abbreviations. Sometimes people use LIB, lithium-ion batteries, or SIB, sodium-ion batteries. Also, the ion and A-ion for sodium. A variety of names.
We'll come to the sodium at the very end because it's the emerging thing and very good for manganese because sodium-ion batteries use an awful lot of manganese and will bring manganese to places which is currently not used in the battery business. Let's concentrate on the main one, which is lithium-ion batteries. Essentially, we have two big families of these batteries. One is called NMC, which stands for Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt, and then followed by three digits, which signify the proportions of these batteries. For example, NMC -622 would be six parts nickel, two parts manganese, and two parts cobalt. Then you have another family, a very small family because there are only two members of the family, LFP and LMFP, which stands for lithium-iron-phosphate, F for iron, Fe, and P for phosphate.
Obviously, there are other varieties as well, but these two groups are the most important ones. About 70% of lithium-ion batteries are consumed by electric vehicles and about 20% currently in BESS, battery energy storage systems. They are developing very rapidly. The stationary storage batteries or off-grid batteries, portables, which are your laptops, your mobile phones, your electric shavers, your toothbrushes, and the rest of it, are only about 4% of all batteries consumed, measured in kilowatt-hours. These are the metals which are used by rechargeable batteries: lithium, Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt, iron, phosphorus, sodium, copper, aluminum, and C4 carbon, which is a form of graphite, a form of carbon, right? Copper and aluminum are mostly used as electric conductors, so they are not actually holding any charge, maybe except for aluminum.
All these other metals are going into the cathode of the battery, which is the positive electrode of the battery. The anode is just carbon, essentially just graphite, powdered graphite. It is growing still very fast. We are expecting seven x growth in battery demand overall. The majority of it is going to be made by electric vehicles. Stationary storage, not far behind, but still much less than electric vehicles. I have to say here straight away that for now, manganese is not used by stationary storage people. They prefer the LFP batteries, as I call them, straight LFP batteries, which are not using any manganese at the moment. They will be using it in the future. We'll come back to that in a minute. It is essentially the transportation story for us, manganese people. The pie is growing very rapidly.
In 2025, all batteries produced were about 1.7 TW hours of capacity. What we are expecting by 2035 is the growth to about 7 TW hours, which is four x from now to 2035 or seven x from now to 2040. The pie is getting bigger. It is really taking off. Despite President Trump's efforts to sort of delay the electric revolution, despite the hiccups in Europe, it is still going strong. We are expecting about 23% growth of electric vehicle sales in 2025. Year to date, we already have 28% growth globally, January to August. It is kind of on target. However, it has its own challenges, but it is going ahead. The EV revolution has not been canceled or delayed. China is a juggernaut, really. It may come to many people as a surprise that.
China produced more electric vehicles last year than any type of vehicles in the U.S. Total production of passenger cars and light-duty vehicles in the U.S. was about 10 million vehicles. In China, they produced 30 million vehicles. Sorry, 20 million vehicles, of which 10 million were electric vehicles. Every second car sold in China is electric today. In Europe, which is here in blue, the U.K., Germany, and France sell more electric vehicles than the U.S. Something to remember. It is catching up very quickly with China. The U.S. is now in the sort of distant third place. Stationary storage is also the very big story. What you see on the picture is a solar farm in California with 3.3 GW hours of batteries attached to it. That is 3 x bigger than the typical nuclear plant in the U.S., which is about 1 GW hour.
There are even bigger plants under construction in Saudi Arabia and in Chile, up to 12 GW hours, 12 x the typical nuclear plant. In batteries, that's unbelievable. We have the anode and the cathode. What we are interested in is the cathode. What is the cathode? It's an aluminum foil covered with the mixture of these metals, which I was talking about. The anode is essentially a copper foil covered with powdered graphite. The cathode is the most expensive part of the battery. It's 30%-50% of battery value comes from the cathode. How does manganese fit into all this? Let's start with the price chart because it's all about the economy. As you can see here, these are the actual prices of these metals in dollars per ton of metal contained in the relevant battery chemical, which is typically a sulphate.
Manganese is 7x-23 x cheaper than cobalt and 4x-8 x cheaper than nickel. As you can see from this chart as well, the cobalt is very volatile, nickel's less volatile, but still volatile. Compared to those two, manganese is extremely stable. If you are a battery engineer and I come to you and tell you that you can use manganese instead of cobalt and you will be paying 7x-23 x less for this material than you paid before, and you will have virtually no volatility of prices like that, what would you say? What would you do? Would you still stick to cobalt, particularly if the country which accounts for 70% of production of this metal is introducing bans and export restrictions and God knows what, and prices jumping up and down all the time?
It's not the way to run business if you are a battery maker. No wonder that this volatility of cobalt led battery engineers to looking for alternatives. What they found was essentially use more manganese. That was the answer. When we look at the cost component of the modern-day battery, you can hardly see the cost of manganese here. That's the actual breakdown from 2024, dollars per kilogram of battery, of NMC- 811, eight parts nickel, one part cobalt, one part manganese. You can hardly see it, but there are manganese batteries which are consuming much more manganese. On the side, in the two side panels here, you have the sort of maximum percentage the manganese can cost in a battery. I use the battery which is consuming 1 kilo of manganese per kilowatt-hour and MO at the highest price we had in 2025.
That would be 12% of the battery. In 2022 prices, that was like just 5%. Still insignificant compared to other battery metals which are making up the cathode. Most of you, even those who are driving electric cars, probably do not know what kind of battery you have. You say you have a lithium-ion battery, and that is all you know. From the point of view of material use, it matters a lot which type of battery it is. Here is a very quick review of these different types, which I mentioned. Eleven out of the currently fifteen battery types being used for electric vehicles are using manganese, but are not using manganese in the same proportion. Here is the elephant in the room. The current NMC- 9050 half is using 42 g of manganese per kilowatt-hour, but LNMO is using over 1 kg of manganese per kilowatt-hour.
If we are shifting from low manganese batteries to high manganese batteries without the change in number of kilowatt-hours consumed by the industry, without the number of change of vehicles produced, we have significant uplift in demand for manganese because of this higher manganese loading or manganese intensity, as I call it. The change of LFP batteries into LMFP batteries, so essentially LFP batteries including manganese, replacing 60%-80% of iron with manganese, they also have very high manganese loading, 300-600 grams per kilowatt-hour. This is what is happening, that we are shifting towards those high manganese batteries with higher manganese loading, and this is like a positive double whammy. We have more bigger pie, more gigawatt hours, and per kilowatt-hour, per gigawatt hour, more kilograms of manganese. The battery mix is changing all the time.
By 2019, we thought the LFP batteries were heading for the scrap heap. They were not very efficient, just for budget vehicles, low range, like 100 km on a single charge and so on, and nobody believed in them. Then what happened? They had a revival, a renaissance, because of a variety of technological developments in LFPs, and they became very strong. By 2024, they accounted for 46% of all batteries produced globally. In China, this year, LFPs account for 77%. That is constantly changing, and we need to monitor it, to look at where it is going, where it is likely to go in the future. That is my projection, my Marketeye projection of 2035. As you can see, LFPs and LMFPs, the ones which are 600 grams of manganese per kilowatt-hour, together, they are at 68%. In red, you can see high manganese batteries.
As well, and. This is NMCA and so on. In total, manganese-using batteries account for 57% of 2035 projected consumption of batteries. You have more manganese GW hours, bigger pie, 6 TW-7 TW hours projected, and more manganese per kilowatt-hour of batteries. If you do not believe me because you say you might be wrong, etc., here is somebody else, which is McKinsey & Co. They hedge their bets. They say, "We might see that many LFPs and LMFPs," but actually, we think that maybe they will take a market share from these batteries here, other, and maybe they will take a market share from the NMC batteries. In total, they are assuming the LFP/LMFP batteries may in total consume 80% of the market, have 80% share of the market. Other people are also predicting that.
That's from Benchmark Mineral 's recent presentation during the London Metal Exchange Week. Year to date 2025, LFPs at 52% globally, NMCs at 42%. However, this is not equally distributed around the world. China is all about LFPs and LMFPs, 79%. In Europe and the United States, it's still an NMC story, so Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt, with more manganese and less cobalt gradually. The market shares of these relevant regions are as shown. Obviously, China dominates. 84% of all batteries are produced in China, 4% in Europe, 6.6% in the United States, and 5% in the rest of the world. However, again, this is changing all the time. I highlighted one of the comments here from LinkedIn, from Ken Hoffman, who is very knowledgeable about this work from Bloomberg and then from McKinsey and many other battery-related companies.
He says, "With battery density and lower costs, LMFP, the LFP with manganese, and LMR, lithium manganese rich, will in our work. Be dominating. Cathode industry for the next 5 years-10 years." That is the leitmotif, what we keep hearing all the time about the manganese-rich batteries. Exploding, so to speak, not literally, but in demand terms. In fact, they are quite safe. Here is just a sample of different car makers, battery makers, and chemical makers, and their roadmaps for manganese-containing batteries. Wherever you see the letter M in red, these batteries are using manganese. That is from somebody else. That is from CRU, China. Whatever is in color is using manganese. Whatever is in gray is not using manganese. As you can see, there is a lot of color in this chart and less and less gray. Again, manganese.
BASF, the German chemical giant, up to 80% of manganese in the cathode. Umicore, another European chemical power in battery making, HLM, highly lithiated manganese, 60% manganese in the cathode. The recent news from mid-2025 about Ford, General Motors, and LG Chem developing, they call it LMR, lithium manganese rich, with 65% of manganese. Here are some headlines from the industrial press, and one internet publisher even declared in Spanish, "El fin de la batería China," because these batteries are going to be mostly produced in the United States, but China is not far behind in this particular technology. That is one trend, manganese-rich batteries. There is another trend. As batteries are becoming more energy dense, so more compact, you get the same amount of kilowatt-hours from the smaller and smaller cube, then the battery pack can be bigger because you are restricted by the dimensions of the vehicle.
If your battery is smaller, your battery pack can be bigger, hence can have more kilowatt-hours. Today, typically, it is about 50 KW hours per vehicle. In China, we already have top vehicles with 140 KW hours per vehicle, and they give you the range of over 1,000 km on a single charge. Of course, not every vehicle will have this big battery pack, but that is essentially the trend, bigger and bigger battery packs. Europe and the U.S. will have to follow, because otherwise, they will be outdone by China. This means that consumption of manganese per vehicle will also grow, even if the number of vehicles did not increase, but it will. I very much recommend you listen to his presentation. If you Google that, Red Cloud's Pre-PDAC 2025 Mining Showcase, Ken Hoffman's speech about increasing battery packs. That is again from CRU. Trends.
High nickel down, mid nickel up. That's good news for manganese because mid nickel means less nickel, more manganese in the chemistry. LMFPs up. Pretty much endorsement, what I already said. Manganese is every battery's friend. Whether we are talking lithium ion, sodium ion, NMC, LMFP, LMR, they are all using manganese. Important thing is about sodium ion batteries. They are kind of emerging. They are ready in the electric bicycles and electric scooters and so on. They are about to start up making an appearance in electric vehicles, but they are not there yet. What is important for us is that they are very manganese hungry. They use about 800 g to 1.2 kg of manganese per kilowatt-hour, which is fantastic news for manganese. They also bring us into this very dynamically developing sector of stationary storage because at present.
We, manganese people, we are kind of cut off from that because stationary storage people want LFP, straight LFP batteries, for whatever technical reasons of how the stationary storage works. We are not benefiting at the moment from the fact that the stationary storage is so rapidly growing. Once they start using sodium ion, and that would be the first major application in terms of gigawatt-hours of sodium ion batteries, will be in stationary storage, then we are in stationary storage. Do we have enough capacity? This translates into the demand for Chvaletice product. Yes, we do in Europe, certainly. In fact, we possibly have too much capacity, to be honest, in terms of gigafactories announced. That is the plan for gigafactories in Europe for 2030. You can read through it at your leisure when you get the slides. At the bottom, you see the current.
Benchmark Minerals projections of increase of battery sales in respective markets. China is expected to go 25% up in 2025. Europe 28% up after the disastrous 2024 when the consumption of batteries actually shrank by 2%. The United States, Mr. Trump should be smiling because it's only growing 0.1% in 2025. Europe is the dark horse after China. Europe is not just about the battery factories. If you go to this website, batterynews.de, it's a German news website specializing in batteries, you'll find 14 different maps of Europe there with the whole ecosystem of batteries. Battery cell production, of course, so gigafactories, but also machine production for battery factories. Battery components. Recycling, the whole lot. I very much recommend this website and reviewing some of these maps. Europe could be, theoretically, could be self-sufficient in batteries.
That's a slide I borrowed from Rystad Energy that was presented during the London Metal Exchange Week in October. The solid line is showing the demand for batteries from the electric vehicle makers. The colored section shows potential output from the battery factories, which are announced by relevant companies, which you can see here on the right. At the moment, there's a big gap. These batteries have to be bought essentially from China and from Korea and some from Japan. In theory, by 2030, Europe could potentially be self-sufficient just buying batteries made in Europe. Whether this would happen, it's another story because we had some setbacks in Europe. We had the bankruptcy of Northvolt and Britishvolt and Italvolt. It's not all rosy, but we still have 40 factories in the pipeline.
Another trend which is developing, I will probably finish in another five minutes, so I'm sorry for those who are in a hurry. It is the changing feedstocks. Until about two years ago, that was just a story about electrolytic manganese metal, the metal flakes like the ones you can see here. Manganese sulphate, high-purity manganese sulphate monohydrate. Both of them come in two flavors, so to speak. Ordinary quality for other industrial purposes and high purity, which is for batteries. The two should not kind of be mixing together because the others contain selenium, which is a big no-no in batteries. To understand why we have new feedstocks developing like manganese carbonate or manganese oxide, Mn3O4, you need to have a very quick look at the process of making batteries.
You essentially mix the sulphates together, you co-precipitate, then you bake them, you mill them, you grind them, and you get so-called pCAM, precursor of cathode active material. It is essentially the mixture of these metals baked and ground to the relevant size. When they come to the battery factory, you add lithium, so they get lithiated, you add binders and solvents, and this becomes a CAM, cathode active material. Then you coat your aluminum foil, and that is your cathode. That is a wet method using water. Everything is dissolved in water. Now there is a new development, which is dry coating, which does not require water-soluble materials. When it comes to manganese, the only water-soluble material is manganese sulphate. With the wet method, they had to use the sulphate. There was no other option.
With dry method, they have access to other materials like manganese carbonate, like Mn3O4, which do not have to be dissolved in water because that is the dry coating process. What about the use of metal? The metal flakes can be used either for making the sulphate, as the Euro Manganese plant is planning to do by dissolving it in sulfuric acid, or it can be used in the powder form. There is a Canadian company, Nano One, who have the metal-to-CAM, metal-to-cathode active material process, which is replacing all this with one sort of patented process. This process is using powdered metal. If they get traction and get commercial, which they might with partners like Rio Tinto, Sumitomo, both at 5% stake, Umicore and BASF, and now they got CAD 5 million from the Canadian government as well, we will probably see much more use for.
Manganese metal flakes rather than just the sulphate. Similarly, this main contender, trying to sort of take the market share from manganese sulphate and MnSO4, this main contender is Mn3O4. This sulphate can be made either from the sulphate, converting the already existing MnSO4 into Mn3O4, or from metal. In fact, last year, 72% of all Mn3O4 in China was made from the metal. We are expecting a greater consumption of metal flakes in the powder form in production of these new feedstocks. At the bottom of the slide, you can see the different varieties of feedstocks and their percentages, how much of the manganese market they claim. In high-purity manganese for batteries is about 1.17% of the total manganese market. As I already mentioned many x before, about 95% of processing happens in China.
For the sulphate, there are just three plants outside of China. For the electrolytic manganese metal, there is just one plant outside of China. One plant, which is in Chvaletice. Here on the sulphate side, there are 14 plants planned. However, many of them are very early stages of, say, exploration companies. They may become the producing mine and the factory in 10 years' time. We try to assign probabilities to them. At the moment, these are the countries where sulphate is produced outside of China. They account for the remaining 5%. Kazakhstan is the most recent addition to it. They only started producing in 2022, and the production for the time being is small. Belgium, that's the American company called Vibrantz, the only company for many years who's been producing sulphate outside of China. There are some other smaller producers elsewhere.
That's my projection of supply and demand. The demand is in the red line. The supply is in green. The darker the green, the more certain, the higher the probability of this project happening. At the very bottom, you have existing producers, then the producers just about to become producers, and then more and more sort of kind of nebulous projects. The yellow is the Mn3O4 supply from one particular plant in China, which had huge plans to produce a lot of it. However, for now, hasn't produced a single ton as yet. They had a very sort of checkered record of delivering on their promises from the past. That's the Ningxia TMI plant. To what extent this is likely to happen? It's hard to say. There are so many moving parts between geopolitics, tariffs, restrictions, trade wars, and so on and so forth.
That's my best guess, best informed guess, how the supply and demand situation might develop. high-purity manganese products. I'm not using the word sulphate any longer because it's not a sulphate alone anymore. This is also a borrowed slide from SC Insights, from again presented very recently in a webinar. And that's their take on demand growth for different battery metals. I want to draw your attention to the manganese here, which is the steepest of the growth curves among all the other metals. I put question marks about others because I have some reservations about this. Cobalt is essentially a has-been metal. It's being eliminated gradually from the batteries for reasons I explained at the very beginning of this presentation. Because the pie is getting bigger and bigger, the consumption is still growing, but probably in 10 years' time, we'll see very little cobalt in batteries. Nickel.
May be again suffering because of huge popularity of LFP batteries and now LMFP batteries as well. Lithium for now. Without a threat. Sodium ion will eventually eat into its market share, but not just yet. Probably we'll see more significant adoption of sodium ion batteries by the end of the decade. It is essentially just to endorse the view that the demand for manganese is growing really, really fast. You may ask about recyclability and is manganese recyclable? The short answer is yes, and there are many recycling factories being built in Europe, as you can see on this map. However, most of them will not recycle manganese, essentially because it's too cheap. That's the quote from one of the recycling guys from Europe who said essentially, "Europe can shred. We have the rules, but not the tools.
We process batteries, get black mass, and then export it to China to be made into proper cathode active material. Essentially, manganese is not being recovered unless it is in the direct, so-called direct recycling, which is one of the recycling routes at the moment, very much in minority of plants. Anyway, I did an exercise to see how much supply in Europe can be satisfied from recycling, if there was recycling of manganese, and came to the conclusion that if only those direct recycling methods were taken into account, it may satisfy about 2% of the demand in 2030. If every recycling plant was recovering manganese, which is extremely unlikely, then they would produce enough to satisfy about 20% of European demand. In short, the recycled manganese is not going to replace the virgin manganese required.
Regarding European policies, there are targets for recycling lithium and recycling cobalt, nickel, and copper. There are no targets for recycling manganese. Finally, last couple of slides about prices. They are not what they seem to be. As you would expect, manganese sulphate is a premium product compared to manganese metal. Manganese metal is the red line. That is the metallurgical variety. Obviously, it is a premium product to manganese ore. Strange things happen occasionally where the prices get reversed, but on average, it is about 30%-50% premium per unit of metal contained in the product dealing with manganese sulphate versus manganese metal. This is an index showing the development of prices of different battery metals since the beginning of 2024. As you can see, manganese here in red, together with nickel, sort of above the water, lithium hydroxide, lithium carbonate, underwater all the time.
Cobalt went up now because of the export ban from the Congo. I think the Congolese are shooting themselves in the foot by doing this. There will be even less cobalt in batteries as a result of it. For now, the prices are shot up through the roof. When we are talking about prices, the price which is most often quoted is the price ex-works China. This is a domestic Chinese price, which is not the same as price delivered Europe or delivered United States. This chart is showing you different components and how the $800 per ton price in China becomes nearly $1,500 delivered Europe or even more than that, delivered United States. Please bear this in mind when you are looking at the screen or newspaper or whatever, Bloomberg feed, and you see $800. It is $800 ex-works in the middle of China.
By the time it's delivered to Europe, it becomes $1,500. Sadly, there is no official quotation of European prices high-purity manganese sulphate for batteries as yet. We only have anecdotal evidence from talking to industry insiders and so on about what the prices are there. Finally, the key takeaways, which I will not be reading through because you've heard it before, but when you get the slides, you will have them all here. This brings me to the end of my presentation. I'm sorry I've overrun, but essentially, there is so much to say.
Wonderful. Andrew, thank you so much for that. I might, or you have stopped sharing. That's great. Look, a lot of the questions that did come through, you've answered them throughout your extensive presentation.
As Andrew mentioned, we have recorded this, so we will be sharing that along with the slides in the coming days. I am going to jump into some questions for Martina now. Martina, just after hearing Andrew's perspective on market dynamics, how do you see Euro Manganese positioning itself to capture the strongest opportunities within that evolving European battery materials landscape?
We, with our plant in the Czech Republic and being integrated and not being dependent on or coming from anywhere else, it is a fine material. It is right there and ready to be processed. That gives us security of supply of the input. We are in the right region. We are in the right jurisdiction. We have not changed the process.
We have proven that the, and you can hear that from, deducted from Andrew's presentation, that going through the metal is the right way to go because it gives us optionality. We can convert a lot of that metal into sulphate because that is currently the preferred chemical. We also have the option to react to the market if the metal prices are higher and if there is a demand for other chemicals. It gives us optionality and the option to supply different customers, not just within Europe, but also in the rest of the world.
Thanks, Martina. Just another one that's come through. As the company moves towards project financing and construction readiness, what gives you the most confidence in the company's ability to execute, and what are the top priorities for the team over the next two quarters?
One of the top priorities I mentioned is the optimization program. We're looking at what we've learned from the demonstration plant. We're looking at a more optimized layout. Even though the prices have gone down since we put out the feasibility study, we have also identified savings in some of the reagent consumptions. That decreases your OpEx. The optimized layout could decrease the CapEx costs, and recoveries obviously increase how much you can produce at the same cost. All this work that we are undergoing should give us a good picture of how we can still make the project a success in the future in spite of the changing market.
Thanks, Martina. This one's come through a few x, in fact. Just on current spot prices for manganese, is the project profitable on an all-in sustaining cost base?
The actual p rice, as Andrew said, is not public. There is no quoted, there is no quoted market. So it's based on Andrew's work that he has done for us in an updated market study. That plus the optimization work is to ensure that we're still competitive and have a project to offer. That's, again, the optimization study. Once we have the results, we will share that.
Wonderful. Just mindful of time. I think finally, what would you say to investors about why now it's an exciting time to be following Euro Manganese and maybe high-purity manganese sector more broadly?
We've heard a lot about how manganese is playing a big role and is going to be playing a big role and how the processing capacity is all concentrated in China, pretty much. Being the only European project for now and others in.
Mainly North America, being less developed and still has a way to go, we have kind of the first mover advantage. As I am going to repeat again, we do have that optionality with going through metal. We are at the right time at the right place. Manganese has been kind of underestimated a little bit and not mentioned as much, but I think now it is getting a lot more traction, and it is a solution to the price and range question that a lot of the mass market might have.
Wonderful. That is actually all we have got time for today. It looks like we have covered all those questions. If we have missed anything, please feel free to reach out via the contact details on the bottom of our ASX releases. Martina and Andrew, thanks again for joining us.
Thank you very much, Jane. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone.