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https://unauthorised investment advice/resources/evs-are-using-less-nickel-and-cobalt-as-carmakers-aim-for-budget-prices-and-that-might-actually-be-good-for-these-aussie-miners/

One of Australia’s few active manganese producers — Element25 (ASX:E25) — has already secured the support of Western auto giants Stellantis and General Motors to build a high purity manganese sulphate plant in the United States, supplied by material from its Butcherbird mine in the Pilbara.“In the LMFP side of life there’s two basic raw materials that they need. One is the manganese sulphate which is broadly the same as the manganese sulfate they need for NMC cathode manufacturing,” MD Justin Brown told *.“But the other one is manganese carbonate which goes into a different LMFP flowsheet. So in our case to produce carbonate we would basically convert our sulphate to carbonate and deliver into that supply chain.”Brown said the improvement in the demand outlook for manganese — largely used in the steel industry — could be ‘potentially huge’.“They basically go from in the latest generation of NMC 8-1-1 chemistries, which has around 10% manganese, the LMFP chemistries have about 70% manganese,” he said.“If you use a 9-5-5 chemistry NMC you’re almost talking 15x uplift. So somewhere between that sort of seven and 15 times demand growth is what the prize is.“They’re not the only chemistries either. You’ve got LMNO (lithium-manganese-nickel-oxide) as well, which a number of companies are working on, and you’ve got LMRs which is sort of a bag term for lithium manganese rich, which are not strictly LFPs, they’re other flavours of high manganese cathodes and you’ve seen Umicore out and announce that they’re bringing to market high manganese cathode materials next year. “So I think on a number of fronts you’ve got this shift to manganese as one of the potentially dominant cathode materials and that’s because there’s a net reduction in cost per kilowatt hour. There’s an improvement in the availability because manganese is just fundamentally more abundant than nickel and cobalt. “And then you’ve also got the power improvement over traditional LFP.”