Far East Capital’s Warwick Grigor has shared his thoughts on a handful of ASX-listed companies in the graphite and battery technologies space, saying on a general note, the market is still showing an inability to discern amongst the battery anode stock.
This includes Sarytogan Graphite Ltd (ASX:SGA), which will soon test the battery performance of graphite from its Sarytogan Graphite Project in the Karaganda province of Central Kazakhstan.
Grigor observes that, although a relatively late entrant to the graphite space, Sarytogan seems to be making good progress in test work on its graphite material from its deposit in Kazakhstan. At an in-situ grade of 29.9% TGC, this 229 million tonnes indicated and inferred resource is the highest grade of any ASX-listed company.
A few weeks ago Sarytogan announced that it achieved a spheroidization yield of 54% in a mechanao-chemical mill. This is an improvement on the 35-50% yield typical in China.
With that result, Sarytogan has all flowsheet elements now demonstrated for production of Uncoated Spherical Purified Graphite (USPG) and Ultra-High Purity Fines (UHPF), with both the USPG and UHPF products to now be tested in advanced battery applications.
Further, thermal purification has achieved 99.998% carbon, at a temperature of 2,700 celsius, much better than the typical grade used in lithium-ion batteries. Another way of looking at this, quoted by the company, is to say that there is only 20 parts per million (ppm) of impurities compared to 500 ppm in the standard battery.
“Worth keeping an eye on”
The company’s share price is still near its lows, which Grigor says indicates that the market is still unsure of what to make of the news flow. He said the market capitalisation of $30 million was quite modest given the possibilities, but it was still in the early stages of its life.
The future share price will depend upon how well its product stacks up against competitors, and how quickly it can catch up and perhaps overtake those promoting their own version of anodes and anode inputs. It is worth keeping an eye on.