Categories: Base Metals / Energy
Topics: General Base Metals / General Energy

Flinders Resources CEO Blair Way on the State of the Graphite Market, Energy Storage, Batteries

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is CEO, President, and Director of Flinders Resources, Blair Way. Blair has over twenty five years of management experience within the resources and construction industry. Prior to joining Flinders, Blair was VP of Project Development for Ventana Gold in Colombia. Blair, thank you so much for joining me today.

Blair Way: Great to be here Gerardo. Nice to have a chat.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. For those of you not familiar with Flinders Resources, Flinders owns 100% of the Woxna graphite mine. It's a unique and strategic European graphite project in central Sweden. Now, the Woxna graphite mine is a production-ready fully permitted graphite mine and processing facility. The mine is really unique due to its high quality large graphite flake and it's long life and the exploration upside, which provides quite bit of an expandable resource opportunity. The project has first class infrastructure, potential to upgrade to value added lithium battery graphite, and of course, the strategic position within the European Union. I know there was a lot there Blair, but I'd like to start by asking you if you could just provide us a brief overview of your background and how you got involved with Flinders.

Blair Way: Sure. My background is project development. I come from the nuts and bolts and the implementation side of project management in the mining sector that involved in multiple commodities such as nickel and zinc and magnesium and gold and copper, so a wide spectrum. I've been involved with Flinders almost three years now. I came on board to get the Woxna facility up and running. At that time, it was a race to production and we won the race to production. Not sure whether many people really truly care that much, but we did and we are the only one's that are in production and that's why we now have our production-ready facility.

It was originally conceived that we would sell into the traditional markets refractory graphite and that market unfortunately is tied to the steel sector which as we all know, like so many of commodities, has gone down in recent times. We decided it didn't make much sense to keep running and producing graphite just to supply the steel sector. Instead, we redirected our focus on the value added and the emerging sector for the graphite space, which leads us into the multitude of opportunities in high purity graphites, graphene and lithium ion batteries and the many myriad of things that are available and demanding a higher value added graphite product from a facility like ours.

Gerardo Del Real: That's actually a perfect segue. There's been a lot of news regarding the battery market recently and the story has gotten a lot of exposure, a good part of that due to Elon Musk and Tesla's Gigafactory and the need for a list of commodities that are really not well understood, but they all play a part in the battery manufacturing process. You're somebody that's very knowledgeable in this space, Blair, which is why I'm excited to have you on today. Can you share with us your thoughts on the battery manufacturing process and some of the misconceptions that you feel are important for speculators in this space to be aware of? Because there's a lot out there.

Blair Way: There sure is. Elon Musk and Tesla, he's done a fantastic job at getting the word out there, electric vehicles and both portable and stationary energy storage systems and the like. We certainly have a great respect in regard for the work that he's done and, of course, with all this exposure, it's created lots of opportunities for people to try and confuse the investing public. It's not as complicated as it probably appears to be, but certainly there is a myriad of commodities that are required and that go into manufacturing batteries. When you read various articles, it will come up and mention lithium obviously because there's a bit of the lithium bubble going on, but there's lithium, there's graphite, there's cobalt, there's nickel, there's copper, there's aluminium. All these elements are critical to the battery, and that's not even really talking about the electrolytes. The electrolytes are made up of additional chemicals which are equally critical to the anodes and cathodes, which traditionally are lithium primarily and graphite.

We also find that what confuses people, as an example of the current Tesla Gigafactory, is currently just manufacturing battery packs. They're not manufacturing battery cells. Battery cells are almost exclusively manufactured in China, in Japan, and Korea, and those cells are then shipped to the various battery assembly plants that are scattered around both in Europe and North America and elsewhere. They assemble the cells into a pack, which is tailor made for this specific application, and that's really where we have gotten involved is to work with the end users who are currently buying cells from elsewhere but are keen to start manufacturing their own cells more specifically tailored to their specific requirements. We're in a position to provide some of those products, such as, at this stage it's graphite, but we certainly are looking at other commodities that these end users are interested in acquiring.

Gerardo Del Real: That's fantastic. Thank you for that Blair. Flinders Resources has had an abundance of news lately, everything from success on the high purity graphite research front to expansion of permitting at Woxna and even a strategic merger with another company that I'm very familiar with, Tasman Metals, which also has a pre-feasibility stage asset in Sweden, a very strategic asset in Sweden. Can you share with us the vision for the new company moving forward?

Blair Way: As I mentioned before, we've been working with end users and primarily focused on selling our high purity graphite products that we believe they would be interested in. As a result of those discussions, they've expressed an interest in a number of other commodities and it really is a direction we're taking the company, is beyond graphite, is to provide maybe, quite possibly, become the one stop shop for many of these end users, to provide them with these other commodities.

The merger with Tasman just gives us access to another exceptionally high quality asset in Sweden as well so we become quite a powerhouse in the European market to provide potential for rare earth element supply in the future for electric motors and the other aspects of this sort of new world order of transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy and utilization. Combining the Woxna production facility in Flinders company with the Tasman REE asset gives us that next step and of course, beyond that, we're looking at all these other commodities that are in demand for the specialty markets, such as the batteries and the graphene and the like. It's certainly an exciting time for our company to take it beyond being just a graphite production facility. We will be transitioning into a company that not only has access to the material from the mine, but also looking at transferable technology, IT, process technology, and preparing and anticipating these future products and demands for the various energy storage and other green energy alternate activities going on in the future.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. It's definitely an exciting time to be in that space. Do you anticipate that merger to be completed here within the next quarter or two? Is that something that's upcoming rather quickly?

Blair Way: Yeah. We expect that to be within the next couple of months. We should have pretty much taken care of that and then we'll be transitioning from Flinders into a re-branded company which better articulates our future growth anticipation, which is, as I mentioned before, into this new world order of energy and energy storage and providing that one stop shop to take it from the mine quite literally almost to the table, certainly to the lab bench tops. That's a direction we're taking the company. It's a result of our experience from working with the various customers and end users and it certainly looks like a bright future for this strategy.

Gerardo Del Real: That's exciting Blair. It's been great having you on. Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

Blair Way: No. I think I certainly appreciate the opportunity to tell your listeners a little bit more about our story and I hope their interest continues to follow our story and they can see the exciting future that we've mapped out for the company. I look forward to speaking with you down the track to give you further updates.

Gerardo Del Real: Thank you so much for your time again Blair. It sounds like an exciting second half of the year. Hopefully we can have you back on soon to talk a little bit more in depth about what that might look like.

Blair Way: Sounds great. Thanks very much for your time Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Thank you Blair.