Interview with Chris Reed, CEO of Neometals, and Darren Townsend, CDO (ASX: NMT)
Neometals innovatively develops opportunities in minerals and advanced materials essential for a sustainable future. With a focus on the energy storage megatrend, the strategy revolves around de-risking and developing long life projects with strong partners and integrating down the value chain to increase margins and return value to shareholders.
A recent deal between Critical Metals and Hannans has attracted some interest. Neometals is a very large shareholder in Hannans and is a large shareholder in Critical Metals who are partnered in the Vanadium recovery project.
Neometals shareholders are keen to understand the upside for them on the Hannans deal on the Lithium recycling technology as it is specifically an agreement that deals with the 4 countries in the Nordics. Hannans needs to fund the investment in business development activities in procuring feedstock, supply agreements etc so that a decision can be made. That would earn Hannans a 50% interest in the licence and Neometals has a direct interest in Hannans and an indirect interest in the Critical Metals’ license.
The 4 countries, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland are blessed with hydropower, and have very supportive governments for this electrification of transport. They have the highest penetration rates of EV in the world, and now the Scandinavian licence area looks like it’ll have 2 battery plants of about 83-gigawatt hours in terms of total capacity, 40 for Northvolt, and 42 for Moray.
The immediate issue that Critical and Neometals are facing is the investment decision at the end of 2022 for the Vanadium recovery project, and that is just the first Vanadium recovery project. Neometals has announced that they’re now working on a second Vanadium recovery project.
The schedule and the budget is on track and the next milestone is to deliver the Bankable Feasibility Study to SSAB in June next year, and everything is well on track for that. The project is in a subsidiary of Critical Metals called RISAB (Recycling Industry Scandinavia AB) which can be independently financed, so Critical and Neometals will own it 50-50.
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