Star leadership team forms for exciting Aussie graphite play Axon

Leading Australian company director Peter Turnbull AM takes key role as chair of Axon Graphite board
$15-25 million IPO will combine two of Australia’s best natural graphite portfolios held by Lithium Energy and Novonix
LEL general manager of projects Graham Fyfe officially appointed Axon CEO

Special Report: A new IPO set to combine and float Australia’s highest grade graphite deposits has appointed one of Australia’s most experienced corporate directors as its non-executive chairman.

Peter Turnbull AM will steer the ship on the Axon Graphite board (future code AXG), bringing with him decades of experience at ASX Top 50 companies, ASIC and its Hong Kong equivalent.

Awarded life membership of the Governance Institute of Australia and a Member of the Order of Australia, he brings both gravitas and an eagle-eyed approach to corporate governance to the Axon board.

“Mr Turnbull brings to the Axon Graphite Board significant commercial, legal and governance experience as well as an entrepreneurial focus on the commercialisation of leading-edge technologies and assisting earlier stage companies to plan and grow,” Lithium Energy said in a statement today.

It comes as neighbours Lithium Energy (ASX:LEL) and Novonix (ASX:NVX) seek to merge their natural graphite assets in North Queensland, located at the heart of a new critical metals ecosphere around Townsville.

They are chasing $15-25 million in the IPO, which a prospectus currently being finalised for lodgement with ASIC. Further details on the indicative timetable for the IPO and record dates for entitlements under priority offers to LEL and NVX shareholders will be come in in due course.

LEL’s general manager of projects Graham Fyfe has also been appointed as CEO of Axon on the ASX listing, while Victor Ho, LEL company secretary will take on the same role at AXG.

Graphite to downstream

The logic of the IPO is It will bring together an experienced board and management team “with a track record of successfully developing graphite projects through exploration, discovery and Mineral Resource delineation and upgrades”.

The aim will be to transition from graphite explorer to development, mining and eventually producing battery anode materials for the lithium-ion battery market.

Those batteries, famously used in the electric vehicles booming in China and Europe, contain eight times as much graphite at lithium, with natural spherical purified graphite typically making up 45-55% of the battery anode.

The rest is comprised of synthetic graphite, a material being produced by Novonix at a plant in America, and silica.

LEL has long proposed the idea of developing a vertically integrated producer with a plant based south of Townsville, coast side of its Burke and Corella deposits near Cloncurry.

Burke contains 9.1Mt at a stonking grade of 14.4% total graphitic carbon for over 1.3Mt of contained graphite, while Corella boasts an inferred resource of 13.5Mt at 9.5%.

NVX’s Mt Dromedary contains 14.3t at 13.3% TGC for 1.9Mt of contained graphite.

Also on the Axon board will be NVX’s Anthony Bellas as executive director and Chris Burns as non-exec director alongside LEL nominees Farooq Khan (exec director) and William Johnson (non-exec director).

LEL recently announced the $97 million sale of its 90% interest in the Solaroz brine project in Argentina to CNGR, expected to complete in the fourth quarter. That comes in equivalent to 86.5c per share against LEL’s current price of 37c.

This article was developed in collaboration with Lithium Energy, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.