Energy Transition: "Eramet has an important role to play in metal sovereignty"

So it's indeed the last year that marked the refocusing of the company on mining and primary extraction metallurgy. The group previously had many downstream activities in metal transformation, so they were sold off, and we refocused on two pillars: metals that support global economic development, like manganese, nickel for stainless steel, mineral sands, and especially the metals of the energy transition, like lithium for batteries and battery recycling.

Well, we are one of the European leaders. We are even one of the very few miners that still exist in Europe, at least in continental Europe. The big global miners are mostly in other regions of the world, whether in North America, Latin America, Australia, and so we have a special role to play, particularly in metal sovereignty for the energy transition in Europe, both for France and for all of Europe.

It depends on what. In terms of revenue, we are much smaller than those groups, which are true giants of the sector, especially because they are positioned on what are called base metals. Many of them do iron, some like Glencore do coal, copper, and aluminum, which are very large volume metals. We are rather positioned on metals that are, I would say, medium volume. They are not niches, but they are lower volume metals like manganese, nickel, titanium, zircon, which I mentioned earlier. So the Chinese are not miners, very few miners. They don't have mines on their territory, but they have invested, and often Chinese metallurgical groups have invested upstream in the value chain in Africa and Latin America. But to finish answering your question, compared to those, we are more focused on energy transition metals, and we are very focused on CSR, and that is a society.

The sustainable exploitation of these metals, and I think it is absolutely fundamental, especially for energy transition metals, since they respond to an ecological need, and if you don't extract them sustainably,

We are in a paradox, and that's why it's very important to do responsible and sustainable mining, also for this reason. We'll come back to that.

So we extract the ores and we transform them, we do the first transformation into metal. What we no longer do is parts or products made from metals. Before, we did things like equipment for aeronautics, we made coupling tools, high added value, that's over. Added value at Val, and this notion of added value is relative, but in any case, we concentrate on the upstream of the chain because Eramet is lucky to have absolutely extraordinary mines, all positioned in the first quartile of the cost curve, so the most competitive in terms of costs, and all with a lot of development potential. So in fact, when I arrived and looked at the group's portfolio, the growth potential was in mining activities, and we have already multiplied them by two or three depending on the metal over the past 5 years, which led to the results you mentioned. So there is a very strong potential in mining that differentiates us, whereas the growth potential was much weaker in transformation.

So first, we have factories because, as I said, we are on the two steps. For manganese, we operate the largest manganese mine in the world, which is in Gabon, by far the largest today, and we ourselves refine a part of this manganese. We have 6 factories that make manganese alloys in Norway, in Gabon itself, in France, in the United States. For lithium, we are opening a mine. Actually, it's a deposit of brine in Argentina, in the salt flats. We extract the brine and transform it into battery-grade lithium already on the salt flat. So what we will sell is battery-grade lithium carbonate that will go directly into battery manufacturing, bought by battery material manufacturers. We are present in over 20 countries. That's right. We are present in mining in Gabon, Senegal, Indonesia, Argentina, New Caledonia. And we have just opened an office in Chile, and we are in discussions with Chilean authorities to get exploration permits and to develop in Chile.

So there have been press rumors about Glencore. Actually, we are discussing with several partners for financing and co-commercialization of our lithium products. In Argentina, we have a partner there, we are majority, we have a partner who is a Chinese partner, the same partner we have in Indonesia. And to finance the other phases of lithium development in Argentina, because we are very ambitious and we want to multiply by at least three, or even more, the production capacity we are setting up, so we need financing. So we did a call for tenders to get what we call 'offtake' financing linked to co-commercialization of products. But the share of Eramet, it suits us very well to raise the financing with and to commercialize on European markets with an operator capable of co-commercializing with us. Glencore is one of those we are discussing with, but it's not finalized yet.

That's a red line. We have put, as I said, social responsibility at the heart of the Eramet model, as I already did when I arrived in 2018, which was to be an engaged, civic, and contributive company. And we have today the rights of communities as a prerequisite for any intervention. So when we enter exploration phases, we start by doing impact studies to see how we can impact communities or not, and we discuss with them, and we ask for an informed consent of these populations for our activities. So we will not start an activity without having consent and discussion with the populations and informed consent of these populations. That is also part of the framework we use, which is the most demanding framework in this sector, and which imposes having informed consent from populations. We also do this for biodiversity. I'll give an example. When we opened a new plateau on our mine in Gabon, for 18 months before starting any clearing, we put infrared cameras to see the movement of animals, especially there are some panthers, great apes, etc. And we decided after this study to freeze 15% of the deposit because it was cross paths and habitats of these animals. So we do things correctly both for biodiversity, fauna, flora, and of course for the populations.

In France, we have a project of geothermal lithium in Alsace, where we extract deep brines in Alsace, hot brine that is currently used for geothermal energy to extract heat. It turns out that this brine has some lithium, so we are associated with Electricité de Strasbourg to extract the lithium from these brines and thus produce 10,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium in France. Very green obviously since the energy will be completely green from geothermal energy, close to consumption sites. So it is indeed a possibility, but compared to the size and concentration of deposits found in Latin America, it is very small. And traditional mining in extremely populated areas, where we operate in Argentina, you were talking about populations, when we arrived on that salt flat, there were a few shepherds, I mean fewer than 10 people who were on that salt flat. When you are in France, you are always near a village, a place of habitation, of culture, and so operating traditional mining in extremely populated areas is indeed a real challenge.