The emergence of the electric vehicle market has companies and investors looking at an array of opportunities to capitalize by addressing underserved industry components.
For instance, many miners are looking to get into or ratchet-up cobalt and lithium production as major metals needed in lithium-ion batteries. Others, like Great Lakes Graphite Inc. (TSX-V:GLK) (OTCPK:GLKIF), are looking at graphite needed in Li-ion battery anodes.
More precisely, the Toronto-based company is focused on CSPG (Coated Spherical Purified Graphite), a type of processed graphite for the anodes.
On Thursday, Great Lakes said that it partnered with Ashland Advanced Materials, a company specializing in producing and high temperature heat treating products used in the solar cell and fuel cell industry from its 70,000 square foot facility in Niagara Falls, New York.
The companies agreed to form a joint venture to manufacture battery-grade products at commercial scale, namely developing a CSPG megafactory. The goal is a consolidated facility with up to 10,000 tons per year of graphite purification capacity initially, expanding to 50,000 tons annually in the future.
Great Lakes already works with partners to perform these processes and now wants to build the infrastructure to house the activity in one asset they directly control. This should improve efficiency and, thus, the bottom line for Great Lakes. The new JV partners are strategizing how the existing Ashland facility can accommodate all the requisite processes to meet the production targets.
Great Lakes says it has already told its Brazilian supply partner about its intentions and capacity goals to ensure no voids in the supply chain.
As part of the ongoing product development and product qualification initiatives, more than 500 pounds of high purity graphite has been produced at Ashland's plant that is ready for additional product qualification efforts.
Further, these efforts included the manufacture of 11 kilograms of ultra high purity spherical graphite purified to 99.99%.
Shares of GLK are trading ahead 27.3% in Thursday action at 7 cents each following the news release.
