Ann: E25 HPMSM project selected for US$166M DoE Grant, page-201

Either the US decides to implement polices that will reduce or remove its reliance on foreign countries outside traditional western alliances for certain critical minerals or it won't. They had a lot of talk and some grants to put that into action. A change in president has created doubt but it hasn't removed the underlying problem that America has a bunch of critical minerals with very high through to 100% reliance on foreign countries - often China.

This graphic was created two years ago but the situation is unlikely to have changed much since then:
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/americas-import-reliance-of-critical-minerals-charted/
Charting America’s Import Reliance of Key Minerals


So the USA is completely dependent on foreign imports of Manganese with most being sourced from Africa. With Manganese being needed for Steel, any remaining steel industry in the USA is fully dependent on imports of critical materials.


Going one step further, high purity Manganese is needed to produce the NMC (Ternary) style of batteries. This is the most commonly used battery type in US battery plants (The Chinese have favoured LFP). If the market evolves to LMFP, high purity manganese is needed. There's currently only two non-Chinese HPMSM plants I'm aware of, one in Belgium (Vibrantz Technologies) and one in Japan (Nippon Denko). A proposed South African plant (Giyani Metals) may be under construction. These non-Chinese plants are under 10% of HPMSM production and its likely they have their output fully committed so the US's HPMSM imports come from China. If China puts export restrictions on HPMSM, the US battery industry would appear to be stuffed and is going into C&M. Trump is playing a high-stakes game.

The US needs a project that imports manganese ore (because they don't have it currently in production domestically) and purifies it to the level needed for batteries. That is exactly the project E25 has spent year's developing, but material doubt remains around whether E25 will be able to execute its planned plant in Louisiana.

If the Market flips to believing the E25's HPMSM plans for the US are proceeding, there could be multi-hundred percent returns. Currently E25 has 229m shares on issue so the agreed grant of US$166m represents over A$1/share of additional equity into E25. If the market both flipped to believing the HPMSM project was proceeding and the project was worth even its estimated construction cost, share prices over A$1/share result from those calculations.