Bergen Carbon Solutions AS (BCS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Foreign Language].

[Foreign Language] Good morning. And thanks to have the opportunity to speak here at Vestland på Børs. Nice to see so many in the audience. And welcome to Bergen Carbon Solutions' Q2 presentation and also a company update using that opportunity. So I'm Odd Stromsnes, and I'm CEO of the company since early 2023. My focus here today will be to give an update of what we have done in BCS since I last stood on this stage for 1 year ago, and I would say we are focused on three main directions. We have invested in more effective in-house testing equipment to speed up our technology development. Our increased technical maturity is also generating interesting enough new potential IP opportunities. We'll learn as we go along and we see there are IP possibilities coming up. We have done a massive organizational change both in terms of head count and in terms of competencies to fit with our strategic direction. We have also secured technology cooperation agreements with other relevant industry players in the global battery value chain, such as Morrow and Beyonder. And we are now in a much more qualified position, I would say, to select who fits our strategy going forward. And I would say, in sum, these directions have significantly reduced our burn rate, and I will come a bit back to that. But first, let me take you through some of the slides of what we do in BCS and why we believe in this technology and the equity story. So we are, as I've said before, one of very few pure-play CCU companies, carbon capture and utilization, with a value proposition second to none, I normally say, with local production of carbon from CO2 and electricity for the world electrification and battery needs. So this is production of sustainable carbon for batteries. All batteries are full of carbon. And today, this carbon is produced mostly from greenhouse gas, from normal gas producing, emitting greenhouse gas and it's made in China. So I would emphasize that we are now a technology development company, developing a complete new CCU process. And to be brutally honest, we are one of these rare companies you should have more of in this country as this could be the start of a very interesting industry, a competence-driven industry. And the demand for greener and more locally produced batteries will grow. We will see an increase in regulations ensuring this. Energy and CO2 will become more expensive, and so we believe there will be a price premium for our local and sustainable technology. However, the technical entry barriers is high. It's a complex product, it's a complex product, also the process as a whole, through a CO2 consuming electrolysis technology, where we harvest the carbon on the cathode and we are producing pure oxygen on the anode. And these different structured carbon we are harvesting on the cathodes are all critical for various battery chemistries. And as a development company, focusing on quality and process optimization by stabilizing and controlling our process, we are documenting our ability to produce a consistent and well-defined carbon powder and consistency is very important of what we do. We need to make sure we are able to produce the same quality all 7 days a week. And this is all about full focus on core technology and not on everything else, right competence, systemization and cooperation. We use the electrolyzers to turn CO2 into solid carbon. We focus on high-quality carbon that can be used in the batteries and our technology enables the production of this material locally and sustainable, unlike the fossil-based carbon produced today in Asia. And our method has significant advantages such as lower emissions, lower energy consumption, and we can do it local. However, it's a new technology, so we still need to optimize our process and product as well as our cost base. And here is what we make at Flesland today. We have offices very close to the airport. Today, we produce only small amounts of carbon for testing and characterization. And we're not making large volumes as we did for a couple of years ago. It's completely new strategy we have in the company. This small amount is for testing purposes, and this accelerates the speed of characterization as we now do more than three test runs per day in average. And obviously, it will take down the run rate significantly. And this is a huge improvement since last year. We make Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotubes called nanocarbon or CNT and graphites or hard carbon called macro carbon. Both product groups have different functions towards the battery performance. Most important, the CNT acts as what we call a conductive additive, basically increasing the battery's electrical interconnectivity. It's reducing the charging time and extending the operational lifetime. And I would say that all new batteries produced now contains CNT. As the global trend towards lower-priced, higher performance batteries, the demand for specialized nano-structure additives are expected to increase substantially. As an example, we do estimate that the Tesla Model [ 3/Y ] alone will need roughly 6 kilos of conductive additives for each car. Tesla produces almost 1.7 million of this model per year. meaning that the estimated need for CNT as, I mean, what we produce, only for this model is in order of 10,000 tonnes. And the good news is that as new and more effective battery chemistries are evolving, so is the demand for more of the conductive materials like CNT. So meaning that if a Tesla now is changing their battery chemistry from today's commodity chemistry, LFP or NMC, to more future-oriented sulfur-based battery, which we are working on, the amount of CNT will double to roughly 20,000 tonnes. And if you apply that to all the 17 million electrical vehicles today, this gets a global demand of 200,000 tonnes of CNT. And in many ways, we can summarize by stating that this is a more advanced CNT-based additives which are allowing the production and the development of new and more effective battery performance. So what we make is critical for developing new battery chemistries. That's important to note. And I mean the development of new batteries is ongoing on a global scale. New chemistries are continuously being developed with the aim to develop more energy storage per unit weight. That is what it's about. And the CNT is a key component for this, as I said, and an important element for these new chemistries, and the demand will increase. The CNT is a conductive agent increasing the battery's conductivity and performance, and the technology is novel. It's sustainable and offers a local alternative to the CNT production going on today in Asia. And the electricity consumption is less than for existing production methods and in the scale production, implementing our new process steps, we believe we can compete on cost. This is something we work on now our cost base. The battery industry is extremely competitive, but China is in the forefront. Following several setbacks for European battery industry last year, we recently saw some good news. Lyten acquires the assets from Northvolt following their bankruptcy, and this is good news as Lyten is developing sulfur batteries, a chemistry which we believe suits our CNT very well. In a geopolitical context, BCS basically ticks all the boxes in a world where the price for CO2 emissions will probably increase and protective incentives for sustainable and local production will stimulate industry like ours. Electrification through a global growth in the battery market is indeed a megatrend. And megatrends are here to stay and is always important to watch. In 5 years from now, 50% of new cars sold on a global scale are electrical. In Europe alone, it's 70%, and in China, more than 90%. And it's a fierce competition with falling prices and oversupply of batteries now. And the global battery value chain is dominated totally by China. However, with anticipated global growth, the battery oversupply is considered by most to be temporary. And with the current geopolitical situation, we believe that local actions will be taken to reduce the substantial Chinese dominance. There are, therefore, many good reasons to assume that European and U.S. players in the battery value chain will succeed and that Western battery supply chain will not be a copy of the collapsed Western solar industry we saw for 10 years ago. The battery value chain, this is a complex slide, but it's just an indication of some companies representing the battery value chain. It's a global industry with massive amount of players. And here, we have listed some of them, primarily split into five value streams: raw materials, material processing, cell components, cell manufacturing and system assembly. And we are an upstream company in this value chain, developing a unique product as a raw material supplier, providing critical material potentially to all four subsequent downstream areas. This picture here is just a snapshot of some of these companies, and we are currently talking to several of them in all the different value streams, including the large automobile manufacturers. This means our client ecosystem is massive with a huge number of potential offtakers where you can go from drop in replacement of our green carbon into a fossil blend for processing or cell component company or as a critical sustainable material towards the cell manufacturer or system assemblers themselves. They all need conductive additives to improve the battery performance and the greener and more local it's produced, the better. So as a proof of this is the recent contract award of a local Norwegian material processor, providing sustainable anode raw material for a large American automobile manufacturer. Another long-term aspect of the benefit of being to the left in this value stream is the flexibility towards new technologies as the continuous change to the battery chemistries will call for modifications to the cell manufacturing and the consequential higher CapEx to the longer to the right of this charge you get. I think it's prudent to state that this is a complex and new value chain not only to Norwegian industry but to a certain degree also European, and many players have internal vertical value streams, and many have focused today on completion of the large CapEx investments rather than exploring the potential in the different value chains. We believe this will change as the industry matures. That's why we have been actively presenting on a number of events and conferences the last year, and we have a dialogue ongoing in more than 35 of these companies. So we would say that the potential here is pretty vast. Geopolitics and tariffs are much talked about these days with new trade tariffs and stricter import controls as well as export bans on critical materials. New regulations on decarbonization, traceability and sourcing of materials are being established. EU is creating a framework that enables the battery industry to be at the forefront of this green transition, green batteries made of local and sustainable components, and graphite is defined as a critical raw material, which means they want batteries with graphite produced in the area. So the regulations presented here as a battery passport intends to prevent and to reduce the adverse impacts of batteries on the environment and ensure a safe and sustainable value chain for all the batteries while taking into account the carbon footprint of battery manufacturing. The battery passport will apply to all categories placed on the EU internal market from February 2027. It's a fair assumption that batteries with a battery passport potentially made with our nanocarbon and graphite could have a competitive advantage going forward. We have already proven our ability to produce valuable carbon directly from flue gas during our a Enova-funded project together with BIR here in Bergen a couple of years back. And this is indeed a true full-scale CCU presentation and shows there are alternatives to more conventional CCS carbon capture and storage project where the need for costly infrastructure and long distance transportation of CO2 is eliminated. Then I'm going over to status some of the financials and the technology development progress. Our financial numbers confirms that we continue to have the finances to execute on our strategic plan. We have a massive 48% reduction in cash burn compared to first half of last year. That's pretty good. And we have a very limited CapEx plan going forward of new equipment. So the cash burn this last quarter is NOK 12.1 million. So we have still a solid cash position, NOK 148 million, zero debt and a satisfactory equity position. In addition, I would say also we are increasingly working on interesting potential for soft funding projects. And here is an overview of the quarterly burn rate since first quarter last year, and we have seen a significant drop during second half last year due to a substantial reduction in head count as well as getting the full economical effect of smaller and more frequent test runs. So for the full year, we anticipated the forecasted cash burn of around NOK 40 million this year, and that corresponds to 40% reduction compared to the full year of 2024. And this has obviously a significant impact to a prolonged financial runway. And as a gentle reminder, the company's strategy is very different today than it was for some years back. We changed that end of '22, early '23. We moved away from targeting production for a general carbon market for a wide number of products and applications towards a much more narrow technology development focus towards the battery market as this is a growing, sustainable, high-end market, high entry barrier and a high willingness to pay for the right quality. Investment into our battery lab and smaller cell testing equipment enable us to reduce this OpEx and significantly speed up the development progress, much faster testing feedback loops, so we are now a pure-play technology development company and not a production company, and I cannot say this often enough. This is important. So this has required a complete new skill set of people. So we are now focusing 100% towards our core technology process, and we have now reflected our head count and staffing according to that. The potential in our novel technology base, combined with ongoing cell testing and battery lab work in the most beautiful country -- city in Norway attracts talent and experience. It's easy for us now to attract good people with experience in the battery industry. This has changed. It's much better now than it was for a couple of years ago. So we have -- I mean, we're a small company. We have a steady headcount of 22 people, which is 35% reduction in head count in a little bit more than a year. And I would say we have never progressed the technology development work faster than what we do now. So our equity story is attractive, developing a technology with a huge potential. As in most development companies, it takes more time than initially assumed. Remember, what we do is really not a commodity business. This is hard core development work into a very dynamic industry with a very complex value chain in a complex geopolitical scene. It's interesting, and it's very rewarding. Today, we produce and test our carbon products internally in order to verify the performance into various battery chemistries. That's why our battery lab is so important. We acknowledge to an increasingly extent that we produce a unique product, this is important, with unique capabilities. And that's why we now are much more reluctant to bluntly compare our specifications of what we make to conventional CNT specifications. And due to special characteristics of our CNT, we see more promising results for some battery chemistries than other and the lithium sulfur battery chemistry is such a chemistry. So for us now, as this is not the asset play, we are not spending time on commercial scale increase, and we're spending time on other areas. So we're spending time on developing further our partner base. And the ideal candidate is a larger industrial CO2 emitter with a business stream that's deep into the battery material value chain ideally in the cell component area. So if we could combine -- if we can develop the technology agreement with the CO2 emitter with also huge competence into the battery cell material development, that will be the ideal partner for us. As such, we have made progress through securing technology agreements with some Norwegian battery companies. And we have also received letter of support from leading chemical and battery material companies and an agreement with global market leaders for distribution of critical materials for sustainable industries. So for us, it's all about further developing our technology, and we're defining it into three stages: transforming CO2 into solid carbon through our electrolysis process, achieve a stable and well-defined technology platform by optimizing input parameters; and then we have the post electrolysis phase, where we are separating and filtering out the carbon as well as cleaning of the electrolyte, enabling a full recycling, reuse of electrolyte, very important for our total OpEx picture; and thirdly, characterization and further testing of carbon production into different battery chemistries in order to verify and benchmark the performance. And first and foremost, the electrolysis is important. And for this equipment, it's all about operability, it's all about size and speed. The smaller volume we test in, the faster we get results and the cheaper the process is. So as I said, during 2024, we have been investing into new and smaller equipment. As a consequence of mixing our new testing equipment with a significant more effective organization, we are now able to harvest, as I said, three batches of test results per day. This is already 3x the testing speed we did for only half a year ago. And from this increase in testing performance, we now do great leaps in our understanding of the process. And despite being a fairly small company, the complexity of what we do is rather advanced. We aim to reduce the testing result feedback loops as much as possible in order to gain faster development progress. We are, therefore, very well equipped, as you can see from this page, as this is an overview of all our tests and all of our characterization equipments. We need to understand and see what we make. So we are categorizing our characterization labs into two groups, the carbon powder characterization lab and the process characterization lab. So where all this equipment brings valuable feedback in terms of particular structure, particle structure, size and composition to our powder characterization as well as bringing process-related feedback in terms of gas content and composition of the electrolyte. These are all key categorizations in order to learn, understand and evolve our process towards commercialization. Last year at Vestland på Børs we announced that we have completed construction of our own battery lab. And this now proves to be very important, it proves to be more important than we had anticipated. And we have now produced and tested several hundred smaller coin cells. And we are now testing carbon materials in different chemistries, particularly LFP and sulfur battery chemistries. And we're doing it with manufacturers of some of these batteries as well. Application testing is done based on chemistry received from some of these companies. And we see promising results from both LFP and sulfur battery chemistries. So I would say our battery lab is definitely a showroom for innovation, enabling faster route to the market. So together with industrial players, we have worked with several of the dominating cathode technologies. Initial test shows promising results, as I said, with our powder, also in LFP, which is a commodity chemistry with increasing global footprint. There will be a blend of different battery chemistries for a number of varying applications going forward. And one of these chemistries, as I said, is sulfur batteries. While this is not a very commercialized chemistry yet, some of the unique characteristics of our material adds much value to the final product and may help overcome some of these challenges on the way to commercialization. We have recently conducted initial battery cell performance testing with our powder with promising results and we are eager to team up with the companies with competence in this area. So in order to summarize, technology development progressing well with faster test cycle, stable operations and improved process understanding. We have strengthened our internal capabilities, performing now full in-house testing for both raw materials and batteries, reducing our dependencies of external laboratories, that's important, progress on battery applications in both current LFP chemistry and future sulfur battery technologies with our material now under testing at leading global battery manufacturers. We have solid financial discipline, and it remains strong with the company maintaining a low and controlled burn rate. And finally, strategic direction more focused on securing technology agreements with the right industrial partner within both the CCU and the battery material technology space. So that concludes my presentation. So now we're opening up for Q&A. Thank you.

Thank you, Odd. Today's Q&A session will be moderated by Fredrik Oksnes, CCO in BCS. The first question received is, is the Huchems agreement still ongoing.

As the sharp listener have maybe noticed, we haven't talked too much about Huchems. We have a current agreement with Huchems ongoing. It will expire in September, if it's not extended. And the basis for this agreement is multiple carbon nanotubes accordance with conventional specifications, specifications to CNT as it's made today from site. And as we have communicated now on a number of times, we are, on some of these areas, not meeting the specifications. We have said that now many times. But at the same time, our continuous development work has verified that our CNT have unique characteristics and which could be more relevant for all the battery chemistries. So in essence, we are putting less importance to meeting all the conventional CNT specifications represented by the Huchems agreement. We have learned a lot through the agreement. But through our battery lab, we are seeing the performance and the results of testing into battery chemistry with our CNT and that gives us much more. We have a unique product made differently than others, and it adds special characteristics to certain battery chemistries. And this is, of course, extremely important learning for us during the last year.

What would you say is the most important next step in BCS development?

I mean, we will continue our technology development and conclude on the platform base. And we are aiming to secure a technology agreement with, as I said, a partner, which can offer both CO2 emissions as well as competence in the battery materials space, and we talk to many and -- but we need to do some more work on the technology development where we are progressing that too, yes.

Since CNT is already widely adopted into different battery chemistries, why is the in-house coin-cell lab as important for you? Especially if you are delivering on requirements, isn't it just a drop-in replacement product?

I mean, we finalized the battery lab during last year. It has proved to be very, very important. We see the results and the performance of the different chemistries through our battery testing. And I'm repeating myself, I mean, we are making unique products with unique characteristics and it adds certain values to some of the battery chemistries. So we will just do more of that. And we have just strengthened the team in the battery lab actually for getting more speed on this work.

The technology development has -- obviously, this is the question mark, but the technology development has taken more time than the company previously has expected. When do you think the company is ready to start moving towards the market?

We -- as I would say, repeating myself, we need to mature the technology, we need to team up with the right players. And this clearly has taken a longer time than what we have anticipated, which is quite common for technology development companies, and we continue that route.

And one question from the online audience here. Who is the commercial -- who is the undisclosed commercial player?

There's a reason for why it's undisclosed, so it's undisclosed.

Okay. Thank you. That concludes the pre-received questions, and we are opening up for questions from the audience.

So I noticed that the battery package, you can save half a tonne by going from LFP to the Li-Sulfur. Why is that? As the sulfur is a smaller part?

No, I mean, that is a very complex question. And I mean, the main response to this is that the importance of CNT -- I mean, the CNT is a conductive agent, it helps the interconnectivity of the battery, basically links all the particles. And this plays a more important role than this chemistry. So we think that, which I tried to communicate, the importance of CNT into all new battery chemistries, especially the next-generation ones, is getting more and more important. I cannot answer particularly on the sulfur side why it's like that, but it is like that.

It should mean quite a lot because...

Yes, it means a lot.

The environmental impact on an EV of saving half a tonne is obviously clear. And chargeability is also better then.