Good afternoon. We're pleased to have Westwater Resources presenting to us today. Westwater is focused on developing a sustainable, high-purity, battery-grade graphite business to address the supply and technical challenges in the energy storage market. Presenting today will be Terence Cryan, Executive Chairman, and Steve Cates, SVP, Finance and CFO. Terence, the floor is yours.
All right. Good afternoon. Thanks for having us today. I'm gonna lead off, and then I'll hand off to Steve. Not real good with the cautionary forward-looking statements, but I'm sure you'll all have an opportunity to read that. So let's talk about Westwater Resources. We're an energy technology company focused on producing battery-grade, natural graphite anode material here in the United States. We're publicly traded on the NYSE American, ticker symbol WWR. We were originally a uranium mining company, and we are now a vertically integrated EV battery graphite materials business. We acquired Alabama Graphite Company in April twenty eighteen. We produced our definitive feasibility study in 2020 for the Kellyton plant, and we took the rather unusual step of building the processing plant before we built the mine.
Because we control the Coosa Graphite Deposit, which is located approximately 30 mi from the Kellyton plant in Coosa County, Alabama. The Coosa deposit is the largest, most advanced natural graphite deposit in the Lower 48 , and it was previously mined back in the late nineteen forties, early nineteen fifties, but has not been mined since then. We did put out our PEA related to the Coosa deposit last December, and we do plan on developing that deposit and bringing it online in late 2028. But we plan to be operating at Kellyton in early 2026 with the offtake agreements we have in place. So why are we in the graphite business, and why does graphite matter?
For all of you who remember your high school chemistry, a battery has a cathode and an anode, and in a lithium-ion battery, the anode is made up of graphite. And graphite can be in both synthetic and natural form, and a typical 100 GWh gigafactory requires a hundred thousand to a hundred and twenty thousand tons of graphite anode per annum. And when you think about the fact that we've got more than fifteen battery gigaplants currently under development in the United States, all of which are scheduled to use graphite as the anode material, there's gonna be demand for a whole lot of graphite anode material. The problem is that right now, we don't produce any graphite anode material here in the United States, and that's why Westwater is in this business.
The U.S. government has recognized the importance of graphite, and both the Trump administration and the Biden administration have defined graphite as a critical mineral and critical to the nation's security and prosperity. So when we think about a lithium-ion battery, and we think about the importance of graphite as the anode, a typical electric vehicle has a 80 kWh battery pack with about, call it 200 pounds of anode graphite in it. That means that for your typical lithium-ion battery, graphite represents 50% by weight of the battery itself. So just stepping back for a minute and thinking about the entire process flow, and this is where being vertically integrated, as Westwater is, is really important for us.
Because here on the mining side at Coosa, from 2028 onwards, we'll be in a position to produce that mining feedstock, that graphite concentrate, and it will come out of the mill at Coosa at about a 95% purity level. But in order for it to go into a battery as an anode material, we need to purify that and get it to 99.95% purity. We also need to get it into the right size through micronization, the right shape through spheronization. Tough word, but basically, it's trying to make those little potato shapes that we need. And then we've got to go through purification to get to that 99.95%.
And then last but not least, we've got to do the surface treatment or surface coating, which is why battery anode material is not a commodity. Every battery producer looks at it a little differently. They all have their own recipe for how they want it. We've been producing samples for battery customers for the last two and a half years. They're a real broad range of customers, and it was really key, I think, to our success to get started in that process early because the qualification process to get into an EV lithium-ion battery is a long one. So there's a great shot of one of our buildings on the plant. At this point, you know, more than two years into the construction at Kellyton, we have all the main buildings up, and we're beginning to install equipment in them.
That's really key because we've had this early market mover advantage. Because we got started early, we ordered the vast majority of our equipment for our plant more than two years ago. We're now at a point, you know, where we've had the very positive anode test results that have led to two offtake agreements, which means we are fully committed for Kellyton phase I with both Stellantis, which we announced in July, and with SK On, which we announced earlier. One of the things that is important about the way we go about our business is that we use a patent-pending proprietary process in the way we produce our battery anode material.
We do not use hydrofluoric acid in the production of our anode material, as is customarily used in China today, who produces more than 90% of the battery anode material in the world. So just a quick recap on some recent highlights and milestones before I hand off to Steve. Again, those offtake sales agreements in place with Stellantis and SK On are critical because it means that 100% of our planned capacity is under contract through 2031. This morning, we announced that we had signed a term sheet for a $150 million debt facility with a global financial institution, and we expect that to represent the balance of funding for Kellyton. Remember, Kellyton is $271 million for phase one.
We've already got $120 million of equity invested in the project, so that $150 million of senior debt will complete the construction for Kellyton, and we expect, since diligence and loan documentation is already underway, we'll close that this year in the fourth quarter, so as we think about that, one of the real value drivers that we have is that earlier this year, we announced that we were increasing the initial nameplate capacity at Kellyton from 10,000 metric tons per annum to 12,500 metric tons per annum without any increase in the overall project cost or budget, and as you can imagine, when you have a 25% increase in throughput volume, your project returns get better, so we think that, you know, Kellyton is really well positioned for future expansion.
We do anticipate a phase two, bringing that expansion to, you know, 50,000 metric tons per year, and we expect that the phase two DFS will be announced later this year, and we think those project economics are really going to be attractive to investors because we're gonna benefit from some of those economies of scale, so with that, let me turn it over to Steve.
As Terry mentioned, there's approximately 15 gigafactories either planned to be built or under construction in the United States. That's gonna leave a shortfall of supply for natural graphite here in the United States. One of the things that's interesting, we talk about electric vehicles. That's really driving a lot of the demand forecast, and so there's a lot of stuff out right now about electric vehicles, the adoption rates. But what's interesting is certain groups that are following this market, whether it be Benchmark Minerals or others, have talked about that even if all the planned anode capacity, which Westwater is one of them, comes online, demand would have to fall over 50% from the projections of what's going on with EV adoptions, and even at that, we just have enough to supply the future demand.
We believe that there's still a lot of tailwinds to the demand for anode graphite, and that's not even considering energy storage. We think energy storage and the batteries for that, that's an enabling technology for renewable energy. To be able to capture, whether it's solar, wave, or another renewable source, to be able to capture that energy, store it in a battery, and then put it into the grid during peak hours, is going to be key. As Terry mentioned, graphite in the anode side of the battery is synthetic and natural, often a blend, somewhere around 60/40, 50/50. But as we see on this chart, it shows that for natural anode material, which we will be producing at our Kellyton plant, the supply imbalance is greater than just from a graphite anode material perspective, when considering synthetic as well.
The global demand for natural graphite is expected to grow to more than two million tons per year by 2035, so what's caused some of this? There's been a couple things. Terry mentioned support from the past two administrations by putting graphite as a critical mineral, that was originally done by the forty-fifth president and then reaffirmed by the prior administration, and there's been a couple of things that have really been catalysts for us when it comes to this. One is the IRA legislation that came out. It's put a 10% production tax credit on the production and process of graphite anodes, so right then, you know, our costs go down, and it helps our project economics, but in December of 2023, China put export restrictions on graphite, which actually upended the supply chain for graphite for a little bit.
There's more requirements for them to export. It's taken a longer time, and it really just shows the need to bring graphite onshore in the U.S., have domestic production, so we're not reliant on foreign countries to be able to produce this here. In May of twenty twenty-four, the federal government passed final legislation and guidance on what constitutes a Foreign Entity of Concern , and in that guidance, it identified China as being one of those Foreign Entities of Concern . This next slide, we get into why that's important so the IRA has a domestic content requirement in which OEMs and battery manufacturers need to source critical minerals for the battery at different percentages that scale up over time in order to provide the clean vehicle energy tax credit.
About half of the credit is associated with the battery, but the interesting thing is, as you see, beginning in 2027, it goes up to 80%. It's nearly impossible to hit that percentage without sourcing graphite from a domestic source, so that's the U.S. or someone that we have a free trade agreement with. But in May, when they passed the Foreign Entity of Concern guidance, what really was a catalyst for us in helping us close our our second offtake deal, was that any battery in which graphite is processed at all in China, whether it's mined there, mined someplace else, sent there, that ends up in an EV vehicle, that vehicle loses the entire $7,500 EV tax credit. So that was significant.
While in some of these early years in, you know, twenty twenty-five, twenty twenty-six, there is the potential for them to be able to source critical minerals on the cathode side and still get the credit. Where are they going to get it when over 90% of the global supply of anode material comes from China? It took away the $7,500 credit. This is, Mr. Terence Cryan's favorite slide, but he lets me do this one since I have to talk about a lot of government legislation. So this really paints a picture as to one of the reasons why we put Kellyton ahead of the Coosa Graphite Deposit. Below the bottom line here shows what some forward, forecasted prices are from Benchmark Minerals on just graphite concentrate, the natural flake graphite. The next line up is uncoated spherical graphite, or we call SPG.
That is the precursor to graphite anode material. And in 2022 and 2023, SPG, this precursor, 100% was processed to some extent by China. Coating, there is some coating, which is the next step to go from SPG to the graphite anode material. The top line there we call CSPG. There is some coating that's done outside of China, but like I said, in 2022 and 2023, 100% of SPG processed by China. But this shows a value multiplier of about nine times going from concentrate once it's processed into the anode powder, which is one of the reasons why we put Kellyton first.
And in my experience, you know, coming up through oil and gas, the oil patch, midstream, downstream, and mining companies, whether it was molybdenum or copper, when you think about the end use of the product, most of the time, a significant part of the margin that's built in from start to finish occurs at the extraction point, right? Whether that's the wellhead, or at the mine. However, because the technology know-how needed to go from concentrate to CSPG, that's where you actually realize a significant part of the margin. And it's one of the reasons the qualification process takes so long and why we've been at this with our customers for multiple years, is to prove we have the technical capabilities of producing this material.
Both of our offtake contracts would not have gotten signed without testing our material beforehand and evaluating that and us getting the check mark that we have the technical capability to produce a quality product. Here's a picture of our Kellyton plant and our site, located in Alabama, as we said, and as Terry mentioned, we've been under construction for two years. The estimated costs remain at $271 million. We've deployed approximately $120 million. We do have an R&D lab up and running at site, although that's not how we produce samples in our pilot program. We actually use full-scale equipment, and we're creating one-ton batches and then customizing those to meet the customer's needs, when we're providing those samples.
But we also feel like having an R&D lab up and running at site is important as battery manufacturers and OEMs look to continually try to improve the technology and the performance of the batteries, that we can be able to continue to work with them and develop product. Our installation in shaping mills and micronizers is nearing completion. And as Terry mentioned, we ordered a bulk of our equipment over two years ago, long lead items, locking in prices, avoiding some of the inflation costs that people have been seeing over the past couple of years. So we have 85% of our processing equipment on-site. Here's another couple pictures of our milling and shaping building, where that is nearing completion. Some really fantastic equipment going up and really good work.
Our second asset is the Coosa Deposit, which, as Terry mentioned, is about thirty miles away from the Kellyton plant. It is the largest source of domestic U.S. natural flake graphite in the Lower 48 , as you can see on this picture here from the USGS. We have explored less than 10% of the total acreage we have mineral rights to. Together, the Coosa Deposit and the Kellyton processing plant represents the first fully vertically integrated domestic supply of battery-grade graphite in the United States that is owned and operated by a 100% U.S.-based company. Incorporated in Delaware, listed on the U.S. Stock Exchange, no one else can claim to be a 100% owned and operated in the U.S.... We put out an initial assessment, as Terry mentioned, our PEA.
I think the thing to point out on this slide is the economic returns of an NPV of approximately $229 million and a pre-tax IRR of 26.7%. The type of mining we plan on doing at Coosa. I've worked in very large mining companies with massive haul trucks and very, very deep pits that take up a lot of space. This is gonna be really small. Small, conventional open-pit mining using just conventional hauling and loading equipment. Think of kind of a common dump you know, dump truck and hauling equipment. It's not these massive haul trucks. And the pits are gonna be pretty shallow, up to 100 ft deep. So it's close to the surface, easy to get to, which helps our cost.
With a mining rate of over 3 million short tons per year, we expect that this will provide graphite to Kellyton for a couple of decades, and that's with considering going into phase II and taking our total production at Kellyton from 12,500 tons to 50,000 metric tons of CSPG per annum. We see opportunity to increase that life and actually add resources with some additional drilling and exploring the over 90% of the acreage we have not explored yet. With that, I'll turn it back to Mr. Cryan.
So let's talk about our value proposition. We're now 100% committed on our phase one production. We've got $120 million of equity already invested into Kellyton. We've just announced signing a term sheet, and are in due diligence on a $150 million senior debt facility. To ensure that we have adequate liquidity going forward, we've got $30 million of committed capital through an equity line of credit with Lincoln Park Capital, and we have an ATM program in place with H.C. Wainwright. I think we've shown over a period of years that we're very careful stewards when it comes to how we use equity capital and look to minimize dilution. But I think it's important that we demonstrate that we have adequate liquidity as we move forward to complete phase one.
So as the only vertically integrated domestic natural graphite anode producer, we are really well-positioned to take full advantage of both the IRA and the Foreign Entities of Concern legislation. Which brings us to what'll be my last slide, and this is a real head-scratcher. So if you think about where we are, when we announced our Kellyton plant, phase one, definitive feasibility study, it had a pre-tax NPV of $417 million. Now, that's before we increased the throughput to 12,500 metric tons a year. So one would anticipate that that NPV number went up. We also have our PEA on the Coosa Graphite Deposit with a pre-tax NPV of $229 million, which brings us to a total estimated pre-tax NPV of $646 million, contrasted with a market capitalization of $31.5 million.
I've been doing this for a while, but I've never seen a discount to NPV that was greater than 95%. So we're gonna continue to execute. We're gonna continue to move this project along. We're gonna bring Kellyton online, and we're gonna allow the market to adjust for that valuation imbalance. Thanks for your time. We'll be around this afternoon and tomorrow for one-on-one, so anyone who would like to learn more about Westwater. Thanks very much.