Nano One Materials Corp (TSX:NANO, OTC:NNOMF) aims to support growth in the lithium iron phosphate (LFP) industry with its turnkey Design-Once-Build-Many strategy for plant construction, which advanced this week with the company’s announcement of a feasibility study for its first LFP plant.
The study is being carried out by BBA as the company continues to evaluate potential sites for its first 25,000 metric tons per annum LFP plant in Ontario and Quebec, Canada.
In conversation with Proactive, CEO Dan Blondal discussed the feasibility study milestone and how it supports the company’s Design-Once-Build-Many strategy.
Proactive: The company had news about its path toward feasibility, a pretty significant step. Take us through what the company announced and where you’re headed.
DB: The feasibility study, what we’re calling FEL 3, is going to be the basis for our future LFP production plant. But it also forms the basis for our turnkey Design-Once-Build-Many strategy to address the broader LFP market, not only in North America but also in Europe and the Indo-Pacific region.
Can you explain your Design-Once-Build-Many strategy?
There simply aren’t enough engineers in the world to build custom plants so we have to be smart about how we are going to expand and build up in midstream between mining and battery. That requires us to design as much as we can upfront and replicate it. It’s a modular format where you replicate the plant or the production line as many times as you can, either with one larger plant or many facilities.
You still have to do some engineering work to bolt it into the local ecosystem to deal with permitting and so on, but the idea is you design as much as you can upfront – a cost-effective solution.
Can you talk through the other steps you are going to be taking this year along with the feasibility study, like securing funding and customer offtake agreements?
In 2024, as well as this feasibility study, what is going to be really important here are critical mineral inputs, establishing the right raw materials suppliers, but also establishing evaluations with our potential offtakers and ultimately an offtake agreement.
You combine that with building out the financing team with the Canadian government and a number of other people in the ecosystem, those are all the ingredients that need to come together first to build that first plant but also drive what we’re trying to do in the broader ecosystem with Design-Once-Build-Many. Most should be in place by the end of the year and we look forward to a pretty exciting and robust growth strategy going forward.
What’s been the reaction to what you’ve been doing at Nano One?
Nano One has a very unique perspective in the sense that we’re coming from the midstream to redefine the supply chain. We still need iron, nickel, manganese, cobalt and lithium all coming together but we can offtake different forms of those materials, allowing us to decouple from China’s stranglehold on the intermediate chemicals.
We are able to provide a North American or European-made solution that can bring security of supply while also lowering the cost because we’ve simplified the process by bringing devices and plants that can be operated in quick form to address market needs. Also, reducing the amount of water being used to eliminate waste streams is a more environmentally friendly solution we are bringing to the market. Our approach is resonating with people, both on the investor side and the strategic side.
Quotes have been edited for clarity and style