PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Junior Lithium Energy on Thursday announced plans for a potential downstream graphite processing hub in Queensland.
The ASX-listed company told shareholders that it had started investigations to establish a dedicated, environmentally sustainable manufacturing facility to purify and spheronise graphite from its Burke deposit, in Queensland, to use as anode material in lithium-ion batteries.
The company said in a statement that the creation of a value adding processing facility, using the Burke graphite deposit as a feedstock, would provide a number of potential advantages, including allowing the company to tap into a significantly greater market with a higher value-added sale price.
The move could also see Lithium Energy become one of a limited number of purified spherical graphite manufacturers outside of China.
The Burke deposit has a 6.3-million-tonne resource, grading 16% total graphitic carbon, for about one-million tonnes of contained graphite.
The project is located adjacent to ASX-listed Novonix’s Mt Dromedary graphite deposit, and is close to Townsville, which is slated to become a focus of Australian battery manufacture with the Townsville Energy Chemicals Hub being considered as a center for refining ore for battery production.