Nano One Materials Corp (TSX:NANO, OTC:NNOMF) has partnered with engineering firm Worley Chemetics to jointly develop, market and license a design package leveraging Nano One’s proprietary One-Pot process for cathode active material production within the lithium-ion battery materials sector.
The ‘design-one-build-many’ strategy aims to accelerate the deployment of One-Pot-enabled cathode active material production plants.
Nano One’s chief operating officer Alex Holmes joined Proactive to discuss the details of the milestone achievement for the company.
Proactive: Exciting news from the company about a strategy alliance you’ve struck with Worley Chemetics. Tell me a bit about this company and how this is all put together.
Alex Holmes: Worley is a very large engineering firm with a presence across the globe and a long list of customers. They’ve been working in the engineering space in a variety of different sectors for many years, but in the last several years they’ve built up a battery materials business that does about $1.5 billion in revenue. They are well placed in the battery value chain.
The Chemetics component of that is actually a DC-based firm that has a large market share in sulfuric acid plants globally. What they’ve been able to do successfully over the last 60 years is innovate with their technology and commercialize and deploy that technology. They do about $150 million a year in revenue today. It’s a company not far away actually from our facilities in Burnaby.
Could you talk about how this partnership will work going forward?
One of the important things to take away from this is we’ve got a first-of-a-kind technology. We focus on reducing the environmental footprint and the cost of how cathode active materials are produced. Worley sees that the world needs to change the way we make battery materials, so very conveniently aligns with our tagline.
What we’re looking to do is deploy our technology in a modular design package way that allows our customers and our clientele to move very quickly and scale very quickly, and so bringing us together with Worley is really about how do we get to market faster with a major global player that’s going to have the ability to help our customers, commercialize our technology in future production plants.
Worley’s client base, decades fostering the kind of relationships they have with different companies around the world, is that a key component of this partnership? In layman’s terms, the rolodex?
Of course. Nano One has a series of target customers that we’ve been working with and sampling to scale. Worley brings a large number of customers with a much longer history to the table. Between the two of us, with the existing customers we’re talking to, this is about bringing that much larger firm to help execute their plans. It brings more confidence to them about the capabilities of our technology and to the Worley customer base. It’s a nice marriage of them.
Quotes have been edited for clarity and style