[Music] foreign thank you very much Amy for the opportunity to speak here it's been great to actually work with you previously and it's great to actually have finally one of these meetings here in Melbourne uh so this is great to be able to talk to you about some of the work that we're doing at csiro but more also to talk about the value chain for natural graphite and where the natural graphite plays specifically into the battery value chain uh this is work that we do here in our Clayton Laboratories as well as with our colleagues in our Perth Waterford facility where we are able to do pilot scale development of graphite processing uh feel free to stop me if you have any questions during this presentation it's probably a little more on the technical side but hopefully uh I can get it get it to a level the way you can all uh appreciate some of the technology here so at csiro we do uh battery research across the full value chain we're the only organization in Australia that can do this so we can go from discovery of mineral ore bodies we can look into the processing of those all bodies and you'll see there on the top left hand corner we're looking into lithium Cobalt nickel manganese and Vanadium as areas of interest because these are all key mineral elements that go into today's large-scale energy storage Technologies so both either lithium or redox flow Technologies and in fact some of these minerals will also be applied to emerging Technologies such as sodium ion which you might have all heard of at recent times which is considered to be a cheaper version of lithium but has a much lower energy density we then move from that processing work to battery material so those upscale the value-added materials and we're looking at those final stage products such as lithium carbonate lithium hydroxide but then some of the advanced cathode materials that are used today such as the NCA that's developed by Panasonic and used in Tesla's nmc materials that are used in other high energy batteries and automotive and of course lithium-ion phosphate now the one of the key Technologies there I'll talk in more detail to you shortly is also around graphite as well we also look at electrolytes and we also have an interest in Next Generation lithium metal technologies through our lithonic technology we can pilot these materials into batteries in our facility here in Clayton we can turn these into anode and cathode materials and then make either a small scale pouch cells for validation which would be a step before you'd go into pilot scale manufacture we're interested in Next Generation technology such as lithium sulfur lithium air but we also look at the packaging of battery technologies and we've worked as an example of this we've worked with energy Renaissance Australian battery manufacturer in tomago New South Wales we have Australia's first gigafactory to actually help develop their their technologies that they now manufacture and sale our deployment work is through our energy business unit we're very interested in how energy is used and deployed and then we're also interested in Second Life and finally the recycling of these materials recycling will be critical in order to be able to maintain uh the volumes of material that will be needed now and into the future for energy storage so graphite the what and the how why are we interested in graphite well graphite comes from carbon it's a single layer material and those layered interstitial layers that you see there on the image on the right hand side underneath that carbon block is where lithium is stored it's that interlayer spacing is Rich As the really criticality that's required the more graphic a material is the more lithium that we can store in there amorphous carbon is no good here it's nice for electrical conductivity but it doesn't actually store any energy so from that we can then you get obviously different allotropes of carbon so of course diamonds so a girl's first friend but they're not very good for storing lithium and then of course we can go from to get that type of stuff is obviously Mining and Australia has actually quite some substantial reserves now and and more being discovered of natural graphite and this is particularly found in Queensland uh Southwest uh Western Australia and also down on the uh the uh air peninsula in South Australia where there are a number of different graphite miners active there to actually to get the synthetic the difference though between natural graphite and synthetic graphite is actually quite substantial generally synthetic graphite it starts from petroleum cope material that then has to be heated at extremely high temperatures to graphitize it over a period of time so it's extraordinarily energy intensive and then from there you then have to then process that further and you'll see there that some of the temperatures that are being required there down a greater than two and a half thousand degrees Celsius uh is made what makes this extremely problematic as a material manufacturer for most part this work is done in in China as energy is substantially cheaper there and that makes it more affordable to do this so this is when we think about graphite in Australia and in my I mean in terms of natural graphite here's the type of things that we're looking for as you go from amorphous carbon at lower temperatures this is what has very good uh ionic conductivity and electrical conductivity and this is what's used to coat graphite um and through to as you higher and higher in temperature we see more of this lattice ordering until we get to The Graphic material that we use inside a battery and that graphic ordered material is what's needed for battery materials in terms of uses there are six you can see here in this plot that up until about 2019 graphite as a use material and batteries was actually considerably lower and in fact the single biggest dominant use of graphite is in electrode materials and that's for aluminum Electro winning uh you need an anode for that material and graphite's particularly good for that you also see that Refractories also make up a significant amount of material as well and also as a lubricant is another area of interest but as you can see the the blue bar in the bottom right of that image and it shows the The Continuous growth in the demand for for graphite interestingly now there's also a new emergent area for the use of graphite and that's in thermal heat storage so for particularly lower grades of graphite where you don't need that ordered and highly graphitized type material thermal storage is a really interesting opportunity particularly for low heat applications in manufacturing production processes so one of those areas of interest is pencils uh graphite is what holds up our pencil industry and is used for the lower grade stuff you can also see that there's some of the use in brake pads is another area of Interest Refractories and then further again up until we get into electrode materials as I mentioned and of course batteries so where where do we find graphite today so graphite has quite substantial numbers of places for mining so China has natural graphite as does Russia but interestingly uh Africa has quite substantial amounts of it through Madagascar Tanzania and Mozambique and for local people here Sarah resources I think mine's out of Mozambique and then transfers its material to Louisiana to their facility in Vidalia where they do the processing of that material to battery anodes and they have a proposed off-take agreement with Tesla which will be using that material there are other Australian miners active in Africa such as ecograph and international graphite they are actually planning to do their actual processing in Kawana in Perth to turn their graphite into value-added materials uh the in the other place where there are substantial amounts of graphite is also in Scandinavia uh particularly Australian minor talga has quite substantial resources there and they're actually they've actually built out a full anode value chain there where they're now looking at how they can actually go from mining to actual anode material and they have produced a proprietary material called Tel node which uses their their graphite together with a silicon additive and they're aiming to supply this to fray a battery company in into the future some of the more prospective areas of graphite as according to the USGS is turkey has bile accounts quite significant reserves but they're yes to yet to be tapped and of course there's also some interest also in South America but Australia is obviously where our interests lie here so how does a battery work and why are we interested in in graphite so in 1974 was the invention of the today's what we know today is the lithium-ion battery through the work of Stan Whittingham and John good enough and they discovered the cat the positive electorate intercalation processes that we know and understand today so those particular materials where in the first instance so Stan's work titanium disulfide as a lithium storage mechanism and John good enough lithium Cobalt oxide and for everyone in the room you're probably using a lithium Cobalt oxide battery today because that's Tronics what makes a full battery though is the anode and all Lithium-ion batteries use graphite as their ano that's the first thing to remember there is a dominant material in a battery and that's the anode material and as you can see here in the image in charging we're moving lithium ions from the cathode to the anode where we store the lithium in the interstitial layers between the graphite sheets and then under discharge those lithium ions leave the anode and moved to the cathode so the interest the real reason we love graphite is that it has what we call a high specific capacity I.E the amount of energy it can store per unit mass and this is 365 milliamp hours per gram so 365 milliamp hours of capacity per gram of material this is in excess of most other commercial materials the only two met two materials that compete with this are silicon and lithium metal and silicon is an emergent material in the marketplace and this is because it has at least a factor of 10 higher storage capacity than graphite but it has considerable challenges in terms of use the other alternative is lithium metal and that was where the initial lithium battery started but there is substantial technical challenges in a being able to plate and strip lithium in a reproducible manner for hundreds even up to thousands of Cycles but also there's a supply chain challenge as well is that there's not enough lithium metal available to actually Supply the battery industry and so there's a real need there to develop new Technical Solutions to actually break that bottleneck so for this reason graphite is the dominant anode material used in today's batteries additionally you're now starting to see companies adding small amounts of silicon to these anodes in order to further boost the energy density of batteries and most commercial cells now have between four and seven percent silicon additive to increase the specific energy of that negative electrode so as I mentioned there's a graphite and this is the reaction chemistry that we use so for every six carbon atoms we have one lithium and this is what we actually see inside a cell for those of you who are really interested in this you start with a very black material carbon at the start of lithiation as we go through the number of different lithiation steps in that anode you'll actually see the color of the material change such that when you get to the fully lithiated compound the lic6 when we actually take the anode out of a cell we see it has this very beautiful gold color which is related to the lithium that's inside the cell if you go into what we call an overcharge regime I.E we put the battery into an abuse condition the actual electorate actually looks silver and that's because you've actually got lithium plated to the surface of that material so this these charge discharge steps these colors also correspond to steps in the discharge profile of the charging profile of graphite that we as researchers can see and track and follow uh to the state of charge of these electrodes but more importantly battery Management Systems can use those to track the the state of health in the state of charge of batteries so as I mentioned earlier graphite may be found around the world but the dominant player in this field and this is from 2020 this may have changed a little bit but I wouldn't suggest too much but China is the dominant player here in graphite so you can see here they've got 79 of this Market uh the other others are all small and even we don't even rate in 2020 on that plot as we still don't actually produce uh graphite material for actual battery production so there's some still quite considerable opportunity here for Australia and particularly since uh there's being a very large reworking of the battery value train as we know it there's also different types of graphite So Vein graphite is a particularly interesting graphite that's potentially found in Sri Lanka it's probably the most purest form of graphite it's the easiest to use doesn't require as much processing to access so it's a particularly useful type of material to get and Sri Lanka produces quite substantial amounts of this material amorphous graphite is obviously the more common form of graphite that we find in this uses a conductive additive inside batteries and that can be made by a number of different methods and the one that we're particularly interested in is flake graphite and this comes from a range of different natural graphite sources so one of the interesting things about this field is that depending on your mind you'll have different types of graphite so a mine site in Queensland and a mine site in Western Australia will not have the same grade of graphite will not have the same flake size will not have the same impurity Matrix similarly if I get a graphite flake from Mozambique or Tanzania yet again it'll have very different geological Pro properties and so we will need to understand those properties in order to be able to successfully recover that graphite from the source and depending on the size of the flake of graphite we may need to do additional processing before we actually try and turn this material into a battery anode so the natural battery graphite no chain is is very is is quite a long one it obviously starts at Discovery but we'll we'll ignore that for the moment but we'll think about first Mining and the first thing that we do once we mine that graphite is we need to concentrate it we need to get rid of the majority of the impurity Matrix for when the graphite sits in so depending on the grade of graphite that can run from three percent uh graphite and some Chinese mines also in some Australian mines all the way up to 25 even 30 graphite obviously the higher graphite content the better value you're going to get from your mine site so concentration occurs via crushing and flotation which I'll go through shortly then we go into a process called spherionization which is where we make small potato shaped materials uh final stage purification and you'll see there we're trying to get Beyond 99.95 graphite why because lithium reacts with everything you want the purest form of material you can to get the highest rechargeability in your device in the longest life carbon coating that's a very much a secret source of most battery oems and then finally turning it into a battery anode and then those materials go into those cells that you see there on the top right hand corner so Mining and concentration what does this look like so this is uh just a plot that I've taken from the battery minerals website now please don't take that as any form of recommendation of their products but this is just a just to illustrate the process so again depending on the grade of material you may need to have numbers of different milling and flotation and screening processes the lower the grade the more crushing the more flotation the more screening higher the grade the less of it so that has an energy penalty so one needs to be mindful of that when uh going through those type of processes but you can see here the screening into drying into filtration followed by a further flotation and potentially more re-grinding depending on how fine the flake is the finer the flake the harder it will be to recover so you may need to do further grinding and flotation as needed finally you get into bagging Trucking and then that can go either to export or as what's seeming to happen quite a lot nowadays companies are Now setting up their graphite processing facility right next to the battery manufacturing plant in order to minimize their environmental footprint once we've done that when you've got your 90 90 89 to 95 total graphite flag you'll want to turn that into these little potato shapes that you see here down on the bottom left why do we want to use little potato shapes well they actually pack better in a Cell so when we think about energy density in the battery we want to think about both gravimetric and volumetric energy density so packing density tap density is a really critical importance in that regard so making potato shapes is far more efficient than just using the simple flake graphite further graphite reacts as well with the electrolyte and so we end up with those hard edges on the graphite flakes we get what we form called a solid electrolyte interface and this material is the decomposition product of the electrolyte on that flake and you want to minimize the amount of those decomposition products because those decomposition products actually mean the battery's less efficient we'll have shorter cycle life and won't work as effectively so for that reason we spherinize to get rid of as much of those hard edges and the like to actually make that process as efficient as possible so there are a number of different ways to do this uh we at csiro we use a Nara hybridizer and what this does is we have a feed and the top of that uh instrument there where we can feed the powder in and through a rotationary process this balls up the little flakes into this ferrodes that you see on the left hand side the Nara hybridizer is not a cheap piece of equipment but it's far more efficient than say a spironizing train that you would buy from China which is cheap and cheerful but does not have the higher yields that you would potentially like to have and so what you end up with if we cross section it is this is the you can see here all the flake particles are all being rolled in till you get this round ball so that's just a whole bunch of graphite flakes packed in together and that's where all the lithium is stored inside the cell and so one of the things that we're trying to avoid here is also damaging the flake so the more you process this material sometimes the more you can make it amorphous and when it becomes amorphous then you don't have storage capacity but it will be electrically conductive so being able to balance that Pro the amount of processing that you do is really critical in order to maximize the storage capacity of graphite and we spend a lot of time working with our customers to maximize and optimize that that process before you go to scale up the last thing that's really important is particle size distribution so we can't just use everything that comes out of this fraternizer because we get a range of different particle sizes for most battery companies they're looking at an in an energy cell they're looking for a particle size of about 15 to 17 Micron they're looking for a really tight what we call D50 and that's why they want as much of that particle size at that 15 to 17 Micron as possible because they know from calculations they can maximize the energy in the cell but you're saying what happens to the big stuff and what happens to the small stuff well the small stuff gets used if you have a high power cell you can use the small material if you whereas the big stuff is probably going to be reprocessed where possible in order to try and maximize its use or it will go to another application once you've got your spherionized particle remember it's still only 85 89 to 95 total graphite content and so it still has impurities present in there from from the actual mineral or body and hopefully you've done your due diligence before you started this process so you actually know what the what the residual impurities are so what we would do that at that point is then work on a purification process to actually remove and Liberate the last of those impurities to bring up that impurity break the process of everything so there's plenty of ways you can do this there's Hydra mythology and there's this generally takes a point around as you can see here this whole range of tests here that we can do you can do things such as using sulfate or and peroxide to deionize water to wash out those impurities the other one that you'll see here on the bottom left hand corner is HF leaching this is generally only done in China because it's really hard to dispose of HF and for any of you who understand HF this is as toxic an acid that you can get if you get this on yourself you're you're in a lot of trouble it's not something that you should play around with so we've been working quite hard to actually look at developing new processes which are cleaner and Greener and getting rid of that HF that step there there's also another step you can use pyromedology basically you can heat this up to 2 800 3000 degrees Celsius and basically melt out the impurities uh graphite's great because it'll just re-graphize itself at that temperature so you won't actually lose anything there so it's quite useful the last step is carbon coding so you know you've got a 99.99 graphite and what you're now trying to do is to reduce the surface area further so earlier I spoke to you about solid electrolyte interfaces and that surface chemistry and those surface reactions we want to remove those as much as possible so what we're now trying to do is to reduce the surface area further to get it as low as possible and while maintaining the same particle size so we can get the best electrochemical performance and so what you can see here in these micrographs on the bottom right hand corner is we're trying to get a very very thin layer of amorphous Carbon on that surface it's transparent to lithium ions it's electrically conductive and this is what we and it will prevent the bulk reduction of the electrolyte on that surface this is the secret source that most battery companies do they'll normally ask you for the spherionized purified material then they'll normally put their own special coating on that material before they put it into battery anodes and then lastly you've got to then go away and build the battery so you now then take that graphite that carbon-coded spherentize purified material you make an ink uh or a slurry or you add some extra materials and a binder and you coat that out onto copper foil copper is the only thing that's stable at the anode side you can't use aluminum because uh lithium will alloy with aluminum that's why they use it in Aerospace so you have to use copper for this process then you'll get it onto a very long winding most companies can produce this at hundreds of meters of a minute they can wind up cells thousands and thousands of cells a day and this is fully automated process but the graphite properties all those properties I've shown you earlier are critical to getting an excellent quality battery and this is what it looks like when you finish you can see here there's a micrograph of the current collector and the inter and the graphite that's smudged into that electrode depending on the size and thickness and the capacity that the company is looking for in its Target Target energy density so the natural battery graphite value and only train is is is is has to be sustainable this is another critical point here and there's quite a lot of work that we're doing here around how do we actually uh deal with some of the energy intensity some of the plastic some of the electrolytes you can see here that graphite and makes up 22 of a battery it's actually quite a substantial amount of material uh copper makes up 17 so these there's quite a lot of work to be done here to ensure that you know we have all the sustainable materials that we need to make this work recycling is a critical point and this is definitely at end of life at the moment we don't have large amounts of volume of recycled material there's just not enough to make this economically available at this time most companies are vertically integrated so Tesla for instance does a lot of its own recycling from its manufacturing facility to recover its own materials because cell manufacturing is only good to about 85 percent acceptance level so the other 15 of sales have to be recycled and the materials recovered and put back into the manufacturing process but depending on the process that you use you may end up either going back to a concentrate or you might go back to as farinized material depending on the processes that are used there and recycling is a whole nother story entirely we have a battery recycler here in Melbourne and virustream who actually crushes and shreds batteries and turns it into what we call Black Mass so that's all the materials higgledy-piggledy into a into a container and then you have to then go away and float that material out and recover it but grab the moment graphite recycling is done via a hydrometallurgical process you can't do that pyramid allergy you'll just turn it into CO2 which is not not the best way forward so there are processes which are being developed in order to recover these materials and I'd be happy to talk to you further about that when csro we do some of this work as well lastly just quickly this is where the the current breakup occurs asphronization and purification is pretty much 100 done in China carbon coating battery anodes there's obviously quite a lot of work going on in other countries and this is going to further diversify particularly with cell Manufacturing in in Europe and also into the us as that quickly accelerates so there's quite some opportunity here to see further diversification in this area in terms of the value why would you want to do this well the further you process the more money you're going to make and I've only just given you some ranges of amounts of money here um probably the guys at Benchmark will probably be able to give you much better accurate numbers around this but depending on how far you're willing to go down down the processing line there's a lot of money to be made uh this area in Australia there are quite a number of companies who have either Ambitions or designs to do so so mineral commodities for an escort lithium energy to say delete just to say uh as just as a few examples ecograph and also International graphite but there are other emergent companies who are also going there and when we think about battery anodes the type of company that would be taking that type of material on in Australia would be a company like energy Renaissance so just some quick final thoughts graphite will be the dominant lithium-ion battery anode material you don't have to worry about that going away anytime soon the amount of investment into this area is so substantial I don't see this moving in a in a in any time soon and it will be the basis of really high energy battery chemistries so demand will remain high technology is advancing slowly so there are some technology challenges coming as I mentioned earlier silicon is one of them but there are still significant technical challenges that exist there to making that actually work commercially Next Generation chemistry such as lithium metal the higher energy ones are there but again they're a technical and supply chain issues that have to be tackled and of course you have the emerging new chemistry such as sodium ion which will capture some of the lithium-ion phosphate battery Market but again there's still going to be a huge amount of demand for for things such as other chemical lithium chemistries there's definitely a need for graphite as you've seen there is quite a bit of processing that has to be done around this and as I've shown you artificial graphite Essex energy intensity from pretty polluting so natural graphite with its higher levels of ESG has some upgrade opportunities to uh to capture some of this market so and some of the stuff that needs to be considered include you know final sustainable final stage purification processes improved yields and carbon free mining and social license is important too the amount of new minds that have to be brought online people have to be brought along on this journey and there is a strong need for new minds the the current demand for energy storage is exploding and there is needs to be far more material developed so there has to be more mining done to be able to support this so there's huge opportunities here for Australia and other places to to to to move into this Market and with that I'd like to thank you and now take any questions that you might have thanks for the presentation I'm just interested in your views around artificial graphite from a performance perspective versus natural graphite and how you think that might evolve for uh for natural in the future so artificial graphite is the dominant material in the marketplace at the moment it's it's really well characterized and works extremely well so most um suppliers such as BTR to show a Denker and others are selling you an artificial material at the most uh in most instances it's a very stable material so it's it's well characterized and it doesn't have any of the has doesn't have some of the well-known degradation mechanisms that natural graphite has which is a one of the problems it has is a swelling issue so with time the particles will expand and contract and you'll lose electrical contact in the material and also you have some additional SEI challenges so some of that can be dealt with through the processing mechanisms can also be dealt with through the carbon coding and also some electrolyte additives so we're seeing more and more natural graphite come into the market and we're seeing Blended material being sold so you can purchase mixtures of artificial natural graphite mixtures on the market now but there will be far more natural graphite electrode materials available in the near future thanks I think we had one more uh yeah it is in addition to the with the artificial graphite is that the main source for current lithium industry mechanism corrected this and also you mentioned HF leaching process so that is on the processing end so that's right that process is done in China correct and what csiro is working on making that process maybe a different process to make it safer correct so um so I do understand that zero resources is also using a HF base final step purification at their Vidalia plant in Louisiana but we at csiro have actually developed a caustic processing method so which is actually able to regenerate that final step purification solution so we can actually take out the impurities from that solution and reuse it again so it makes it far more sustainable and we can actually tune that to the impurity Matrix so if we do good characterization at the initial step of the graphite process we can actually work out how how we tune that caustic to actually remove that impurity Matrix quite easily and we've done that for four miners now here in Australia uh could I just ask a question just um I mean I feel like graphite for a little while and and um you know I often see presentations like this where demand is is is increasing and very strong but when you look at the market the price has been flat and um there's a lot of projects that are out there you know at the PFS stage but none are really getting off the ground um so just interested in your thoughts on that and while they um you know the macro seems to look good really activity is pretty low yeah it's I think there's a lot of price pressure and I'm probably not the best person to ask this is probably the Benchmark guys but we we see from talking to battery oems um price they're they're heavily squeezed because they're squeezed by the automakers or the end users and the battery materials makers are trying to maximize the value and they're they're the oems are trying to pass the cell makers are trying to pass that pressure down the line so they're trying to Max minimize the amount they pay for these materials so this does lead to a chicken in the ad problem of you know they complaining that there's not enough Supply but they're not also paying top dollar and this is because most of the cell chemistries you see today are now mass mass sold commodity products so it's very hard to get that high price premium you might argue so that does that does make a big issue I will say that but I think you're going to see simply by sheer demand that the pool is going to increase very strongly particularly with now every country having some mandate towards net zero renewable energy uptake and to do that you need more storage this will or this this should hopefully create um correct some of those price problems that you that you describe when I don't know though The Tipping Point's been reached so that's basically been covered and supply chain crises and people trying to untangle themselves from China people are now actively looking for alternative Supply chains that's why you're seeing governments both in Australia the US Europe coming out with critical minerals plans to try and diversify Supply chains trying to open up new markets such that everything doesn't run through China because that that's now considered to be a major impediment to to being able to provide this localization of Technology and Manufacturing so I do see these type of Technologies all of a sudden taking off in the very very near future because most countries won't probably allow synthetic graphite manufacture and most companies probably couldn't afford it with the current current electricity prices you'd need to have a pretty pretty big solar field to make this work or cheap hydroelectric power so I think natural graphite will reach um will very quickly take off for the very reason that there's this diversification in Supply chains opportunity that's happening thank you