Financial Post Interview – Alabama Graphite: The Future is Bright Green

In a recent interview with the Financial Post Alabama Graphite Corp. (TSXV:ALP,OTCQX:ABGPF) President and CEO, Donald Baxter, discussed the current graphite market.
As quoted in the interview:

Alabama Graphite has a resource: a huge graphite deposit in the mining friendly state of Alabama; an experienced management team: President and CEO Don Baxter, P.Eng.and his team have significant graphite mining and processing experience; and a truly unique business strategy: to produce a finalized battery-ready graphite product, as opposed to producing a primary-processed concentrate as almost all other graphite companies are pursuing. An apt analogy would be if Alabama Graphite were in the petroleum business, it would be producing 94 Octane premium gasoline, while its competitors were producing barrels of crude oil.
Alabama Graphite’s core strength, brought to the company when Mr. Baxter came on board, is its corporate strategy to move directly to the production of battery-ready coated spherical purified graphite or CSPG.
Perhaps the important take away from the company’s accomplishments to date is that AGC has evolved from a mining story into a technology story. Specifically, a green-energy technology story as it pertains to batteries. The lithium-ion battery market is growing rapidly. Demand stems from consumer electronics (such as smart phones and laptops), electric vehicles (which utilize up to 200 pounds of CSPG per vehicle), and most significantly, from stationary batteries (meaning, energy storage for electrical grid, commercial and residential buildings; solar, wind and traditional power storage and peak shaving). In fact, the Panasonic Corporation forecasts exponential growth in stationary batteries, with a 74% CAGR (2014-2025). All of these applications require finished CSPG, not conventional graphite concentrate. Additionally, it is worth noting that, on average, there is 10 to 30 times more graphite than lithium utilized in a lithium-ion battery (CSPG is used as the anode in a lithium-ion battery).

Alabama Graphite President and CEO, Donald Baxter, stated:

AGC is built on a foundation of three pillars, including the PEA, our CSPG battery performance results and the pilot plant results. The PEA (announcedNovember 30, 2015) indicates that the economics of the project are sound based on diverting 100% of primary production to secondary production of higher-value CSPG. Notably, the byproduct of CSPG is purified, micronized graphite (for use in polymer, plastic and rubber composites, powder metallurgy, energy materials, and friction materials, among other applications), which provides us with another salable product at no extra cost for producing it. The second pillar is the successful independent testing of our 99.95% Cg CSPG in lithium-ion batteries (announced January 19, 2016).
Alabama Graphite manufactured 60 coin-cell batteries. These results demonstrated that we are able to produce our CSPG to battery manufacturers’ specifications and that it performs better than costlier and environmentally damaging synthetic graphite. The third and final pillar is our pilot plant (announced February 3, 2016), which demonstrates that we are able to achieve a high carbon grade, averaging 96.7% across all flake sizes. This means 100% of the concentrate to be produced via primary processing from the Coosa Graphite Project is expected to be suitable for secondary processing. Further, upgrading from 96.7% to the 99.95% Cg required for CSPG should not be problematic at all.

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