Ann: E25 HPMSM project selected for US$166M DoE Grant, page-231

And these are 100% understandable sentiments. If you look at slides like the one below, you get a "does not compute" type answer.

The world market will soon be at 20m EV's. Many of them have no Manganese because of LFP. If you were to get 20kg of Manganese per EV (on average) then world demand has become 400m kg of Mn or 400kt. The comments appear to relate to Manganese metal (except for lithium which is measured in LCE) meaning you need to increase the volumes from 400kt if considering a product that isn't pure metal. HPMSM is 32% Mn and 68% other defined salts. This 400kt becomes 1,250kt of HPMSM. You could also be back to the EV growth rates so another 200kt of HPMSM capacity is needed each year. This has the potential to create one almighty boom in HPMSM but it hasn't yet and at the moment the Chinese are keeping the battery plants that need HPMSM supplied.

E25 has two good offtakes but needs a 3rd to firm up the capacity for the first plant. I suspect they are looking for a funding contribution from the 3rd offtake customer, but something is stuffing things up. One of the potential stuff-up's is Trump's tariff's. They will cause companies to go back to the drawing board around the location of not just their proposed facilities but the supply chain that feeds the plant. This adds unexpected delays that started on 2 April 2025. Companies are unlikely to sign a binding offtake deal for Mn until they have their whole plant design sorted and some idea of the timeline for building it. Its possible E25 had something close to being agreed and it got delayed. Perhaps I'm being overly generous.