Graphene Manufacturing Group Ltd (TSX-V:GMG, OTCQX:GMGMF) CEO Craig Nicol talked with Proactive about the company receiving a key environmental approval for its graphene coating technology.
In the interview, Nicol outlined that the company now holds the approval conditions from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which will allow it to commercialize its graphene-based coating across the United States.
This coating is used on air conditioning units, data centers and other heat exchangers to improve thermal efficiency and reduce corrosion.
Proactive: Welcome back inside our Proactive newsroom. And joining me now is Craig Nicol. He is the CEO of Graphene Manufacturing Group. And Craig, it's great to see you again. How are you?
Craig Nicol: Yeah, great. Thank you. Good to be back on.
So I know you've had a couple of pieces of news that we're going to talk about in just a second. But first, maybe for those not totally familiar with the company, remind everyone a little bit about the company.
Yeah. GMG is a clean technology manufacturing company. We make graphene from our own process of natural gas, and then we go and make that into a number of energy-saving and energy-storage products — which include a coating, a lubricant additive, a battery additive, and a very new next-generation battery.
And so you're announcing today that you've been getting EPA approval, which is a real milestone for the company. Maybe explain what this approval is and what it means and what the technology is that’s being approved.
Yeah. Excellent question. EPA approval for graphene products is pretty rare. There's probably only one or two that otherwise have it. We now have the approval conditions in hand. We've got to go through the process of signing it, which should only take a few weeks. So we should soon have approval, consent and notice — which will allow us to sell our graphene coating into the US for coating products in air conditioning, data centers, and various other types of heat exchangers, with basically no limit.
That’s a huge validation of what we're doing, and it shows the government thinks it's safe and legal to sell around the world. The US was the last country to get the approval. So this now completes a global opportunity for us — which is really exciting, because it's a global product that can help heat transfer and reduce corrosion in any heat exchanger in the world.
And the key to that in the end is saving money, right? This allows companies to adopt the technology because it helps the bottom line.
Yeah, that’s exactly right. We typically say there's a 10 to 20 percent reduction on air conditioning bills with our coating. It can be applied in situ, so on the building, or in the factory. We already have a number of large companies in America testing the product, which is very exciting.
When you see what our product can do, there really should be no reason why every air conditioning coating, heat exchanger, or data center cooling system isn’t coated with it. It improves efficiency and stops corrosion — which are the two biggest concerns in this industry and ways people try to reduce costs. Our product tackles both.
So let's just give a quick update on the commercialization. You're expecting the first shipment to come early in the new year?
Yeah. We've already got orders in with our partner Nu-Calgon, which has over 4,000 shipment points across Canada, America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. They've been actively promoting the product to their customers. The product was launched over a year ago, so it's very exciting to now be talking about the exact parameters of the physical product launch — which will happen early in the year.
We look forward to a conversation when that happens as well. We should also mention you had an update on your battery demonstration — the aluminum-ion battery technology. Let’s update everyone on that.
Yeah. So our battery technology uses only aluminum-ion instead of lithium-ion. It offers fast charging, is safe, has a long life, and a low cost. There's no other battery that really does all that in the market today. The only similar battery is a lithium-titanate-oxide battery (LTO), which sees about $6 billion a year in sales.
Our battery can charge in six minutes — which very few others can do. We’ll continue progressing its development over the next year and are targeting commercial production in 2027. It's a simple and low-cost battery to make, with long life and fast charging. That changes the way we believe customers will work with batteries. Because it’s no longer hours to charge — it’s minutes. That shift could enable new use cases. We’ve had a lot of big companies wanting to work with us. We just need to get the technology to the next level, and we’re progressing well.
Sounds like it’s going to be a busy 2026. A lot of change for the company coming.
Yeah. A lot of exciting points. A number of our products are going into full commercialization. We’ve got our small packs opportunity, which could be significant next year. We also have the Beijer Ref launch in Australia for air conditioning distributors — which means all refrigeration systems there can be coated with our product.
And now we’ve got our US launch, which is the largest air conditioning coating market in the world. So three big opportunities coming after many years of work — and of course, the battery continues to progress as well.
Quotes have been lightly edited for style and clarity