Hi,
...
My understanding was that the majority of the market is currently synthetic with some companies blending in some natural graphite...
Most of the Anodes produced over the past 10yrs have a +35% natural Graphite content, which has steadily increased to approx. sitting at 50/50 today and is predicted to continue increasing that %...so there is already plenty of Natural Graphite in circulation which requires a recycling solution.
Once Graphite supplies form Tanz comes online that % will improve further due to the superior quality of some of the Tanz G deposits vs China Deposits, EGR is one of them, there are some other non China deposits that are better than Chinese deposits but they will not be able to compete with Tanz due to significant labor and energy cost differences.
Keep in mind there are 3 different potential income streams from EcoGraf recycling alone:
* Recovery of 'Black Mass' which is currently ending up in landfill from LiB recyclers
* Recovery from 'Production Scrap' which accurse directly at the cell/anode manufacturing lines and re feed it into the process again.
* Blending of recycled Graphite with fresh Graphite === Lower the cost of the Anode to the car companies.
And also important to remember is that it's not exclusive to one company, EGR has another very (potentially) lucrative active assessment with one of EU's large recyclers, MTB Group, where the aim s to also recover the Copper together with the Graphite:
(20min delay)