The way I understand is HPMSM is far more capital intensive. it is a further refined product. Most companies process the ore to HPEMM first then process the HPEMM to HPMSM which can be very costly.
I believe E25 can go straight to MSM and skip producing EMM? Or rather due to the ore body's mettalurgy it doesn't require expensive processes like roasting and grinding. Im not sure if I am correct in saying this if someone wants to chip in. Which puts them as a front runner.
The company claims that their hydrometallurgical leach processing and purification process which was developed with the CSIRO is the key factor in utilising manganese ore from their Butcherbird manganese ore deposit in Western Australia. Recent laboratory tests have produced 99.95% EMM (Table 6). Justin Brown, Executive Director of Element 25, outlined the following project comparisons: “We have a very large resource, currently over 180Mt and with the current base case of 100kt pa EMM we would have a mine life in excess of 100 years. The geology is simple and unique. The orebody outcrops, with a life of mine strip ratio of 0.2:1 meaning our manganese units are very low cost. "We have excellent infrastructure, with a bitumen highway and gas pipeline going straight through the project. The availability of gas coupled with cheap renewable energy will provide a very competitive cost of power. "We use a wet scrubbing process to upgrade the ore from around 12% to around 28% manganese which is the feed for the leach circuit. Our process extracts 95% of the manganese in around 30 minutes at ambient temperature and at atmospheric pressure. "The reaction happens efficiently from 75micron right up to around 4-6mm particle size. Most of our competitors have to fine grind and either roast the ore or use a sulphuric acid leach with leach times of between 6 and 24 hours. "The compound effect of these competitive advantages means that we expect to have a very long life project with a sustainable production cost at the lower end of the bottom quartile and likely the lowest globally.”
As far as batteries go people are ditching cobalt and are trying to use avoiding manganese.
Tesla already announced it has a cobalt free battery.
SVOLT has made a battery without cobalt.
Magnis making batteries without cobalt or nickel.
Yet to see one without manganese though.
All lithium ion batteries above. NCM811 seems like it will be the go to. 8 parts nickel, 1 cobalt, 1 manganese.
they are looking at NCM955. 9 parts nickel, 0.5 for the others.
Battery makers are moving towards higher nickel batteries.
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