The American automobile concern General Motors Co and Japanese technology group Panasonic Holdings Corp signed agreements to purchase battery materials for electric vehicles with Canadian producer Nouveau Monde Graphite Inc and will invest in the company to help it produce high-quality graphite in North America.
GM and Panasonic have committed to purchase 18,000 metric tons of active anode material per year for a period of six to seven years, Nouveau Monde Graphite points out.
The mining company is developing a project in the Canadian province of Quebec, about 100 miles north of Montreal, and plans to build a graphite concentrator nearby. A refining facility to make active anode material, which makes up about half of the battery in an electric vehicle, will also be built in Becancourt, Quebec, where GM and Ford Motor Co build factories for battery components.
The cost to build the entire operation is estimated at about 1.2 billion USD, and Nouveau Monde Graphite plans to raise 725 million USD in debt and 475 million USD in equity.
Now GM and Panasonic are each injecting 25 million USD into the company.
“We needed players willing to commit over a 10-year period, so here we have three years of construction and seven years of bulk delivery”, notes Nouveau Monde CEO, Eric Desaulniers. “Now we will be able to create a financial structure, which otherwise could not have happened. This is really the most important stage for us to continue our progress”, added he.
The firm is also backed by the Quebec government’s financial arm, London-based private equity firm Pallinghurst Resources LLP and Japan’s Mitsui & Co.
Graphite is a key material used to make the anode, the negative electrode in electric vehicle batteries, while the cathode is the positive electrode that includes lithium. Almost no battery graphite is produced in North America, and the battery supply chain relies heavily on China, which has at least 90% of global natural graphite anode capacity.
