Business View Magazine | June 2020

76 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JUNE 2020 and spent two or three years working pretty hard on developing that as a resource, then looking at options to commercialise it to ship a concentrate product to steel mills or smelters. Then, the markets in Australia had a downturn in 2012 through to the early part of 2017, so we slowed work down on that project and tried our hand at a couple of other projects in the meantime. But the gamechanger for us was when CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) partnered with us. They are the federal government industrial research arm that helps industry solve problems that allow projects to move forward. “In our case, we used their expertise to help us find better ways to process manganese ores. They helped us to understand how we could potentially look at downstream processing of our ores to high purity manganese products, including Electrolytic Manganese Metal (EMM). And of course the Electric Vehicle boom has led to a surge in demand for lithium ion batteries which has added a turbo charge to that because these batteries require high purity manganese sulphate. “That really transformed the business. We did some commercial studies, some optimisation on the metallurgy on the back of the work that the CSIRO did with us, and we were convinced that this project can be developed into a long-term, environmentally friendly, low-cost, high purity manganese producer. And that was the catalyst to change the name from Montezuma Mining Company to Element 25, 25 being the atomic number of manganese. Since the breakthrough in 2017, manganese has increasingly been our focus and now takes up just about all of our efforts.” BVO: What does the actual development entail? Brown: “The typical path for an explorer is to find a deposit and then drill it out. Which we’ve done and we’ve calculated a resource of over 260 million tons of manganese ore at