E-Power Resources is dedicated to exploring for mineral resources in Quebec.
The Montreal-based exploration firm is on the lookout for commercial exploitation opportunities. Its current focus is on the key EV battery metal, graphite.
The Market Herald recently chatted with company CEO, James Cross.
TMH: James, to start with, give us a bit of a background or synopsis of your company and how it came to be.
JC: We started the company back in late 2018, and it started really because my business partner, Peter Danielson, who has done a lot of deals in resources before, and has an investor following, was getting questions from some of his investors about Electric Vehicle batteries, and to see if there was something we could do in that space in resources. The first thing we set about doing, was looking at which components or material components of an Electric Vehicle battery might be facing a supply crisis soon. The conclusion we came to was graphite, so that’s why we’re here.
TMH: You just began trading on the Canadian Securities Exchange in January, how have the first few months as a public company gone? Give us the highlights.
JC: It’s going well. We were a private company from October 2018, all the way until January of this year. We floated the shares on the CSE back in January, it wasn’t done concurrently with a financing; it was just a flotation of shares that had been a private company the day before. Since then, we’ve done a private placement and raised just under a million dollars in the public markets and acquired two new institutional investors. The shares, when they opened up in January, were probably a little too high. They opened up somewhere around a dollar but since then the shares have settled in the low 40 cent range. To me that represents real value for investors, with a roughly $10 million market cap.
TMH: Let’s talk about graphite. You have two projects in Quebec, one of them the Tetepisca Graphite Project. Why are you so enthusiastic about Tetepisca and the idea that the demand for that particular resource will increase?
JC: We are. If you look at a recent study, put out by Benchmark Minerals Intelligence, they forecast that, mostly because of the growth in Lithium-Ion batteries, that the world is going to need about six and a half times the amount of graphite it produces today in about 12 years, and billions of dollars have already been allocated to build battery manufacturing facilities all over North America and Europe.
Volkswagen just announced that they’re going to build a big plant in Ontario, capable of building a million Electric Vehicle batteries per year. Which alone would account for about seven and a half percent of today’s annual graphite supply. We’re very bullish on the material. The Tetepisca Graphite District, where our Tetepisca property sits, is the highest grade known graphite district in North America, and it sits in Quebec very near some top-class infrastructure and the Port of Baie-Comeau. We have indications of very high-grade graphite there in an easily accessible place. We’re very excited about that and our next drill program.
TMH: You are about to start a drill program. Tell us about that work and what you’re hoping to get out of that and when are you getting started?
JC: We’re looking to start that the first or second week of June, and it’s going to be a program of about 3,000 to 4,000 meters. The purpose of it is, thus far we’ve narrowed our exploration down to five target areas on the property, and this drill program will be to determine which of those five target areas is most likely to produce us a world-class graphite deposit. Then the second drill program to occur around October, would be really for resource delineation on that chosen target area.
TMH: Looking a little further ahead, where do you see the company in 12 months?
JC: We start this drill program in June. We get the results; we would go back to the capital markets, say in September, to drill in October for resource delineation, and that would be more like a 20,000-to-25,000-meter program. Then collating the results and getting a 43-101 resource estimate written, might bring us to about March of next year. This day next year, if things go according to plan, we should have a world-class graphite deposit on the books.
TMH: Is there anything else we haven’t touched on at this point that is important for your investors and our viewers to know?
JC: There was a recent announcement by a company called Graphex, as well as a company called Innovation and Development Manicouagan, which is a Quebec government funded company. They announced that they’re choosing a site in Baie-Comeau, to build a 200,000 ton per year battery anode material manufacturer. Now the reason, I’m sure, they’ve chosen Baie-Comeau is its proximity to the Tetepisca Graphite District. They know there’s graphite nearby. To give you an idea of how big that is, a plant producing 200,000 tons of anode material per year is going to need at least 200,000 tons of graphite per year and because graphite forms the entire anode side of a battery, so right in our back garden you could call it, there’s going to be a need for what is currently about 15% of global graphite supply per year. We’re in the right place and Baie-Comeau has easy maritime links to Europe and easy rail links to the rest of North America.
James Cross is the CEO of E-Power Resources. The company trades on the CSE under the ticker symbol “EPR.” You can also visit www.e-powerresources.com for more information.
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