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General Market Commentary
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General Energy
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General Market Commentary
Leading Edge (TSX-V: LEM) riding the electric car wave with encouraging Woxna tests
Leading Edge Materials Corp (CVE:LEM) this year certainly seems to be delivering on its aim to supply materials vital for a low carbon energy world - not least the batteries used in electric vehicles.
If a firm could be said to be 'on trend', then surely this is one....
Elon Musk's baby Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is never far from the news and with its market cap surpassing first Ford’s (NYSE:F) and then General Motors’ (NYSE:GM) last month, talk of electric vehicles supplanting gasoline-powered peers has grown louder than ever.
A Tesla buzz..
That Tesla buzz centres generally around lithium, but notably such batteries contain more graphite than they do the other, and, as well as cars, are used in all sorts from smart phones to solar panels.
Leading Edge Materials (CVE:LEM) has now, in the second set of encouraging battery test results this year, revealed that material from its Woxna mine in Sweden has been used to make a 18650 lithium-ion battery cells and performed well.
Such batteries are equivalent to those used in Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) electric vehicles and the firm said results were 'strong and consistent', shwoing they could be used to create a long battery life - vital in such vehicles.
At the Woxna mine, the firm usefully has 100 tons of material stored and available for further testing. Testing is a vital part of development such resource technology and is likely to go on for at least six to 12 months more, according to LEM.
The firm is encouraged by the growing demand for lithium-ion batteries, and is ready to supply potential new gigafactories in Europe (like Tesla's in Nevada), and it is in the right place to do so - in Scandinavia.
At the end of April, the firm announced a $2mln investment, secured from a select group of strategic European investors who are active in the development of European electro-mobility and green energy storage markets.
Leading Edge says it's the only western producer of natural flake graphite with a fully constructed, permitted and producing plant (100,000-tonne-per-annum feed producing 10,000 tons of over 90% graphite concentrate).
The Woxna plant was on care and maintenance when the firm bought it in 2011 and operations restarted in 2015 using freshly mined material but falling prices for flake graphite and a downturn in the sector meant operations stopped.
The plant is now on what's called a production-ready basis while higher value graphite products are developed and will not restart until market conditions improves.