Ahah, there it is ...the buyout figure for the competitor, and...

Ahah, there it is ...the buyout figure for the competitor, and the growth trajectory NMT looking at:

Some of our competitors, there aren’t that many that are in the public arena. The Li-Cycle guys have probably got a flow sheet that’s reasonably similar to ours that got bought out for USD$975M in a Spac deal. They’ve got 2 5,000t shredders and a 1t a day pilot plant. We’ve got a 20,000t shredder and a 1t a day demo plant. I would say they’re 4 or 5-months ahead of us in terms of their creating back mass and selling that but I think with SMS, we’ve got the capability to build many - they’ve got 14,500 employees. Apart from the EV world, economic activity in Europe means that there’s probably plenty of latent capacity to build plenty of plants. We’re very much looking forward to the future.


Also, timeframes:

Christopher Reed: Sure, so the Lithium battery recycling project has been commercialised in a joint venture with SMS Group, which is one of Europe’s leading engineering houses. We own it 50-50. We brought along the IP and knowhow; they’ve brought along their plant construction skills and operation skills. We’re currently building a demonstration plant at Hilchenbach in Germany. The front end of that plant will be the largest capacity in Europe. We’ll run it at about - it’s permitted for 1t a day, so we’ve got feedstocks that have been supplied by German carmakers and stationary energy storage battery producers. We’ll run trials, so we’re going to commission that demonstration plant this quarter. We’ll finish the demonstration trials in July. We will then look at completing a class 3 zeroing cost study by the end of October, a Feasibility Study by the end of December this year and look to make an investment decision in the first quarter of 2022. Under the joint venture with the Germans, we are looking at - they will build the plant, they can operate and maintain it should we choose to, and they’re on a best endeavours’ basis are responsible for procuring 50% debt financing, and they are the second-largest generator of German government-backed KFW loans. We’re very happy with SMS’s performance, it’s been exemplary. You can see from our social media if you follow Primobius on Twitter or LinkedIn, you’ll see regular updates and as you would expect, it is a state-of-the-art piece of German engineering. Jeremy can now comment on some of the progress that the commercial team has made. Certainly, the technical stream, fully funded through to that FID and on track.

Matthew Gordon: Before Jeremy jumps in, you talked about 1t a day for the pilot plant. What’s the scope or extent of the full commercialised plant? I want a sense of scale.

Christopher Reed: Stage 1 for our first commercial plant is a 20,000t nominal capacity. We have a 20,000t per annum capable shredder at Hilchenbach, which is SMS’s manufacturing headquarters. That’s designed to take the production scrap and off-spec material from a Gigafactory. We’ll then look at Stage 2, scaling that up by a factor of 10, to take the end of life. In the cell-making plants, typically a steady-state scrap rate is about 10%. In the early years, they’re 20% - 30%, but we have to plan to accept the other 90% back at end-of-life. We do our engineering studies on both a 20,000t per annum rate and a 200,000t per annum rate.