Business View Magazine | June 2020

79 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JUNE 2020 ELEMENT 25 L IMI TED Brown: “Battery chemistry is evolving all the time but in all the mainstream chemistries for cathodes, manganese plays a role. Increasingly so, because of the three metals that go into the current generation of cathodes (nickel, cobalt and manganese), manganese is the lowest cost. And adds a lot of value in terms of thermal stability. In a grid storage environment, a manganese battery is a preferred chemistry. In an EV, the tendency is for higher nickel cathodes because they’re more energy dense, but they also have some challenges from a thermal stability point of view. So, manganese is very much a player in both grid storage and EV batteries.” BVO: Why should investors be interested in the project? Brown: “The Butcherbird Project is unique for a number of reasons. Based on a mining scale of 42 years for Stage 1, we will only use about 20 percent of the resource, so there is a huge opportunity for expansion and a long-life