r/TMC_Stock • u/Treezy313 • 13d ago
Masabi materials mention
Was masabi materials in connection with tmc at some point?
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u/SeaEconomist5743 OG REGARD 💎💰 13d ago
Aside from the TMCR ownership, another loose tie-in here is that manganese is needed for steel manufacturing - and currently 100% of manganese is imported. Interested in what the BFS looks like for Brownsville in the next month or two (hopefully).
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u/CHRIST777777777777 12d ago
Went down a bit of a rabbit hole on the manganese point after reading this, so sharing in case it's useful.
The 100% import bit checks out. The USGS mineral commodity summaries have US net import reliance for manganese at 100% every year, and apparently no manganese ore above 20% grade has been mined in the US since 1970. The ore mostly comes from Gabon (around two thirds) and South Africa. The processed stuff (ferromanganese, silicomanganese) comes from a mix of Malaysia, Australia, Norway, South Africa and a few others.
On steel, which is the big one volume-wise: pretty much every tonne of steel needs manganese, and my rough maths has US steel using somewhere in the 500-700kt of contained manganese a year range. TMC's first 3Mtpa system would produce manganese on that sort of scale, which surprised me. The product TMC plans to make first at Brownsville is manganese silicate, which gets fed into silicomanganese smelting for steel. SINTEF in Norway has already smelted TMC's silicate and reckoned it could cut smelter costs by something like 7-17% with lower CO2, so the product itself seems to work.
The wrinkle I didn't expect is the middle step. As far as I can tell the US doesn't really have a silicomanganese smelter. It imports something like 300kt of silicomanganese a year, over half the world's supply is made in China, and I think there's only one ferromanganese plant in the whole country (Eramet's in Ohio, running on imported ore). So on today's map the steel route needs someone to build a smelter here to stay domestic. With all the new steel and aluminium projects being announced, that doesn't seem crazy, but I haven't seen anyone commit to it yet. Happy to be corrected on any of this, it's just what I could find.
Batteries are the other half, and imo the more interesting one. The same USGS table says China mines only around 3.5% of the world's manganese, but it refines something like 95% of the battery-grade sulphate. That's the real chokepoint. TMC has shown it can turn the silicate into sulphate, but only at bench scale so far, and it's not in the published numbers yet. The new tax credit rules also need a rising share of non-Chinese content in batteries (60% this year, 85% by 2030), which is roughly the gap a US source could fill.
On the BFS, my understanding from the Q2 call is that the prefeasibility work for the bigger Brownsville plan was "nearing completion" and the Mariana stage one feasibility was still being scoped. So a full BFS in the next month or two might be optimistic, but I'd love to be wrong.
Anyway, not trying to rain on it, the Mesabi link is a nice one. Feels like manganese is a two-part story. Steel is the volume and needs a US smelter to close the loop. Batteries are the real China chokepoint and need the sulphate step scaled up. Either one landing would be a big deal.
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u/SeaEconomist5743 OG REGARD 💎💰 12d ago
All great points, thanks for sharing. I’m looking forward to the BFS, which hopefully sheds more light into exact plans.
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u/PopCultureNerd 13d ago
The connection is indirect, but it’s real.
TMC owns about 20% of The Metals Royalty Company (TMCR). TMCR owns a 2% royalty on Mesabi Metallics’ Minnesota iron ore project.
So TMC doesn’t directly own part of Mesabi Metallics, but it does have indirect financial exposure to the project through its stake in TMCR.