PERTH (miningweekly.com) – ASX-listed Mineral Commodities (MRC) will take a stake in Canada’s Green Graphite Technologies (GGT) after entering into an equity and licence agreement with the company.

Under the terms of the agreement, MRC has vended intellectual property developed for the company by Kingston Process Metallurgy into GGT in return for a 10% stake in the Canadian company and an exclusive technology licence for Norway and Western Australia of GGT’s GraphPure process.

GGT has been granted funding of C$1-million from Sustainable Development Technologies Canada for a pilot plant development for the GraphPure process, in a consortium with Nouveau Monde Graphite, Eagle Graphite and Rain Carbon.

The consortium will co-fund the pilot scale development, and it is hoped that this process will be followed by a demonstration plant.

“We are delighted with our collaboration agreement with GGT and look forward to the results of the pilot programme,” said MRC MD Jacob Deysel.

“The agreement allows MRC to cost-effectively advance two purification processes, the GraphPure and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation process, through pilot-scale development, further de-risking this key enabling technology for natural graphite anode materials and supporting our strategic plan for vertically integrated ore-to-anode materials production.

“We are excited about the calibre of the consortium members that the GGT team has brought together for this project and look forward to evaluating and qualifying the coated purified spherical graphite produced.”

MRC owns and operates the Skaland graphite operation in Norway, the world’s highest-grade operating flake graphite mine, is the only producer in Europe, and is planning the development of the Munglinup graphite project, in Western Australia.

In April this year, the company released its five-year strategic plan to delineate and implement its aspiration to become a leading vertically integrated diversified producer of graphitic anode materials and value added mineral products.