ASX- and Aim-listed Sovereign Metals has appointed consultant Dr Surinder Ghag to its owner’s team as chief technology officer for graphite.
Ghag will assist Sovereign’s graphite strategy in qualifying the graphite product from its Kasiya rutile/graphite project, in Mali, for lithium-ion battery anodes.
A major component of graphite sales agreements is customer qualification. As chief technology officer for graphite, Ghag will be responsible for designing and delivering graphite downstream testwork programmes to be aligned with graphite product development and qualification as Sovereign continues discussions with battery anode processors, end-users, and potential future offtake partners.
"Dr Ghag joining Sovereign will significantly enhance our graphite metallurgical expertise and understanding of the downstream market to translate Kasiya’s bottom-of-the-cost-curve advantage into significant active anode market capture," said MD Duncan Craib.
A prefeasiblity study has confirmed Kasiya’s potential to be the world’s biggest natural graphite producer at 244 000 t/y of graphite concentrate. On an incremental cost basis, Kasiya would also be the world’s lowest-cost graphite producer at $182/t.
In June 2023, downstream testwork on Kasiya’s graphite demonstrated it to have superior qualities, showing excellent suitability for use in lithium-ion batteries.
In July 2023, Rio Tinto invested A$40.4-million in Sovereign resulting in an initial 15% shareholding. Under an investment agreement, Sovereign and Rio Tinto will work together to qualify Kasiya’s graphite product with a particular focus on supplying the spherical purified graphite segment of the lithium-ion battery anode market.