RNU (ASX) General Discussions

Originally posted by bombersmadd: ↑

One of the best articles I have read regarding the looming Graphite Squeeze coming to a screen near you in 2022.

Below is snippets showing forecasting completed by Benchmark Minerals for battery minerals such as graphite & lithium. What truly excites me is how Out of Date the majority of these forecasts are right now from the time they were produced in 2020, given the significant announcements made by Battery manufactures and OEMs over the past 12-18 months.

For example the below is based on the assumption Global Battery Capacity will be at 2.4TWh by 2025, increasing to 3.4TWh by 2030.

As I mentioned, The Above Graphs are so far out of date it isn't funny. As the Guru himself Simon Moores and the Team at Benchmark posted this past week.

Current Global Battery Capacity in the pipeline as of today exceeds 3.8TWh by 2025 and increases to 5.6TWh by 2030 (A 60-65% Increase from 2020 Modelling).

For Graphite, this has a significant impact on the supply vs demand scenario. I have highlighted in red in the below how battery anode material would need to increase exponentially to meet the currently announced battery plant capacity globally.

The simple fact is that every time a company announces an increase in battery capacity or they are building a new plant, the previous forecasting model gets thrown out the window. So much has changed over the past 12 month period and so much more may change over the coming 12 month period.

GLTAH ! Only 1 more sleep until the Quarterly Update tomorrow

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It has been a few months since I last posted on Global Lithium Ion Battery Capacity plans in the pipeline. The Guru's at Benchmark Minerals now have us sitting on a grand total of 283 following LG + Stellantis JV for Canada

Benchmark Minerals are now tracking Global Battery Capacity of;
-3.9TWh by 2025
-5.9TWh by 2030

With a large disclaimer message that they expect announcements over the coming period to exceed 10TWh by 2030. The question then becomes where will all the raw materials come from and which factories will no doubt miss out on securing enough supply to reach their planned capacity.

Renascor correctly highlighted in early 2020 that based on anode demand forecasts at that time, in conjunction with Renascors plans to produce approximately 28ktpa of Spherical Graphite per annum, the world would require 90 x Siviour sized projects to enter the market by 2030 to meet that demand.

Fast forward to March 2022 (Today) the world now requires a total of approximately 6.1Mtpa of Anode Material by 2030 to meet the currently planned 5.9TWh of battery capacity. This would require approximately 146 New Siviour Sized Projects to come online by 2030 to meet that demand (146 new projects at 28ktpa)

I had touched on previously that the anode demand forecasts that the majority of companies are still utilising in presentations today are out of date. The most recent up to date was produced by Black Rock ($BKT) a month or so ago which had demand by 2030 at 5.9Mtpa (Although 11 new gigafactories have been announced since BKT published this in their presentation). The total demand for graphite anode material now sits at approxmiately 6.1Mtpa as mentioned above.

146 New Siviour Sized Deposits is simply not feasible. Even when Renascor releases its Optimised DFS in Q2 if it shows an increase in PSG production to 60ktpa making RNU the largest producer of PSG outside of China, the demand forecast by 2030 would still require +70 New Projects producing at 60ktpa