I've just received this email for the Company being an update...

I've just received this email for the Company being an update for H1 2020. Good initiative, timely and with excellent content, so I'm posting the lot in case it's of interest to readers here. It should be ...
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Zero Carbon Lithium - a Half-Year Update

Dear ***, It has been a very active and successful first half of 2020 for the Vulcan Zero Carbon Lithium team. We would like to provide a short update to our supporters. A reminder of why we are doing this: The world is rapidly undergoing a once-in-a-century transition to electric vehicles (EVs), the new "engine" of which is the lithium-ion battery. Europe in particular is pushing extremely hard to fully electrify its transportation, to meet its goal to be carbon neutral by 2050. Highly aggressive government and industry EV production goals are constantly being announced. In Germany, despite COVID-19, EVs sales growth is increasing exponentially. The last internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle rolled off the production line at the Volkswagen Zwickau car factory this week, which is now becoming fully electric. It is literally the end of the line for ICE vehicles. The dawn of EVs is here: Europe is putting in unprecedented effort into tooling up to manufacture the lithium-ion batteries for these EVs, so much so that Europe is the fastest growing lithium-ion production centre in the world. It is growing from roughly 20GWh of cell production in 2019 to over 415GWh in 2028, over a 20x increase. This production requires a lot of lithium hydroxide: greater than 400,000t per annum just in Europe by 2028, compared with the current entire global demand of around 350,000t per annum. Europe currently has no domestic supply of lithium hydroxide, and China controls 80% of the world supply. In a time of increasing global trade tension, this is a sub-optimal situation for the auto industry in the EU. There is therefore a very strong push from the European Commission, federal governments and industry across Europe to create a domestic supply chain for lithium hydroxide. This is coupled with a strong push to decarbonise the footprint of lithium-ion battery production in Europe, involving the creation of so-called "Battery CO2 Passports" which will quantify the CO2 footprint of production. This is because lithium-ion batteries currently take a lot of CO2 emissions to produce, principally because of the metals density of the cathode, and the EU auto-industry wants to produce net zero carbon footprint EVs as delivered to the customer. Lithium hydroxide has an environmentally problematic supply chain, either coming from hard-rock sources, the processing of which emits a lot of CO2, or from South American salt lake brines, which use a lot of water through evaporation. So, in summary, Europe needs an unprecedented amount of lithium. For strategic and environmental reasons, the current supply chain is not fit for purpose. Enter Vulcan's Zero Carbon Lithium Project. The largest lithium resource in Europe, hosted in the Upper Rhine Valley in Germany, at the epicentre of the automotive and nascent lithium-battery industries. A combined geothermal and lithium resource, hosted deep in the sub-surface in a hot, geothermal brine, which is already a source of renewable energy in the region. We are aiming to pump up the hot, lithium-rich brine to the surface, use the renewable heat to power our lithium extraction process, and produce the world's first, premium Zero Carbon Lithiumhydroxide. Crucially, no hard rock mining is involved, and no large evaporation ponds are required. The whole process is environmentally friendly and in fact generates a surplus of renewable energy that can be sold in to the grid. It has been a busy first half of the year: We completed our Scoping Study, which was highly positive. A third party environmental consultancy completed the world's first Life Cycle Analysis on the Vulcan Project, showing that we will potentially be avoiding approximately 15 tonnes CO2 per tonne of lithium hydroxide produced. We commenced bench-scale lithium extraction test work towards our Pre-Feasibility Study (PFS). We finalised an agreement to buy a package of 3D seismic data over our project area, to accelerate project development. We were lucky enough to be joined by German lithium chemistry expert Dr. Katharina Gerber, and communications and impact investing expert Ranya Alkadamani, on our Board. We presented to VP of the European Commission, Maros Sefkovic, alongside VW and BASF. We secured EU backing for the project, via an agreement with EIT InnoEnergy. We completed a $4.8m institutional and ESG investor equity placement. We are now well-funded for our PFS, which will be the full focus of the team for the second half of 2020. According to leading analysts in the space, Vulcan is the best performing lithium company for year to date in 2020, with a greater than 250% share price increase since January. We have had recent analyst coverage from Alster Research in Germany: a link to this report is provided below. We now intend to continue our successful trajectory and push hard with executing on our technical and commercial goals, in 2020 and beyond. I thank all of our supporters, old and new, who are joining us on this challenging and exciting journey.

Alster Research June Update

Best regards, Dr. Francis Wedin Managing Director