Zentek, the owners of a high-grade graphite deposit, near Hearst, has landed a half-million-dollar provincial grant to do ongoing innovation with a graphite purification process.
The Guelph company’s subsidiary, Albany Graphite Corp., is using its $500,000 grant from the Critical Minerals Innovation Fund (CMIF) to produce very high-purity graphite for batteries and possibly for nuclear use.
Zentek is a graphene technology company. It possesses a geologically rare and highly pure graphite deposit near Constance Lake First Nation and the town of Hearst. The site of the deposit is situated 30 kilometres off Highway 11. Zentek focuses on delivering nanotechnology solutions in health care, environmental and in industrial applications.
Last year and earlier this year, Zentek announced it had been producing "ultra-high" 99.9 per cent results from an Albany sample using a new purification process.
The sample had been run through a furnace at the National Research Council of Canada (NRCan), where it was upgraded from 85 per cent to greater than 99 per cent.
Zentek wants to see if this upgraded material can be used an anode component for lithium-ion batteries and if there were any possibilities in the nuclear sector.
Graphite is categorized as a critical mineral in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. In a news release, Zentek said electric vehicle batteries require up to 125 kilograms of graphite per vehicle.
The funding from Ontario will keep the company on its research and innovation track. Albany Graphite is chipping in $314,500 and NRCan is contributing $200,000 worth of in-kind support. NRCan possesses an electrothermal fluidized bed reactor where these highly pure samples are refined.
The processed graphite material will be supplied to manufacturers and end users in the fields of energy storage, clean energy, nuclear, advanced material and for other high-value product uses.
“The CMIF grant will enable (Albany Graphite) to build on its recent purification successes and produce additional flotation concentrate that will be used for subsequent purification and anode development testwork,” said Greg Fenton, the outgoing CEO of Zentek, in a statement, “and produce marketing samples of ultra-high purity graphite samples for third-party evaluation in advanced material applications.”
Fenton resigned Sept. 3 to become CEO of Nevada-based Altek Advanced Materials. He will serve Zentek in an advisory capacity.
The discovery of the Albany deposit was made in 2011 by a predecessor company known as Zenyatta Ventures. The graphite at Albany is said by the company to be suitable to process for use into high-end products.
A 2015 preliminary economic assessment placed a 22-year open-pit mine life for Albany with projected production pegged at 30,000 tonnes of graphite ore a year. The company also imagines an underground mining scenario. The deposit has been drilled down to a depth of 625 metres with the resource remaining open at depth.
In 2023, Zentek published a mineral resource estimate for Albany, showing an indicated mineral resource of 933,000 tonnes of graphitic carbon inside 22.9 million tonnes at an average grade of 4.1 per cent. The inferred resource stood at 375,000 tonnes of graphitic carbon within 13.1 million tonnes at a grade of 2.9 per cent.
