2025 Year in Review: Advancing a Domestic Manganese Supply Chain

In 2025, manganese moved from commodity footnote to national security asset. NATO formally recognized it as a defense-critical raw material. The U.S. and EU reaffirmed it as a Critical Raw Material. For Green Manganese, this wasn't validation of a thesis — it was the broader market arriving at a conclusion we had already built for.

Here is what we accomplished.

Why the Manganese Supply Chain Became a Policy Priority

The U.S. and Canada import 100% of their manganese products. Europe imports 100% of its metallic manganese. The combined market exceeds $2 billion annually — entirely dependent on supply chains concentrated in a handful of exporting nations, with China controlling the majority of processing capacity.

At the same time, North America and Europe hold over 1 billion tonnes of manganese resources. Most are low-grade and uneconomical to process using conventional methods. Green Manganese's technology was designed for exactly this gap: processing low-grade ores and industrial waste at recovery rates and cost structures that make domestic production viable.

As the U.S. Department of Energy has noted: most manganese deposits are low-grade, and expanding domestic capacity requires technology that conventional smelting and acid leaching cannot deliver. Our acid-free, water-based hydrometallurgical process addresses both the technical and environmental constraints that have blocked onshoring.

The policy shift in 2025 made this conversation easier. The need had been there for years.

Technology Validation: TRL 5 Achieved

The core milestone of 2025 was reaching Technology Readiness Level 5 — bench-scale validation on real industrial feedstocks under real operating conditions.

Manganese recovery results across feedstock types:

• Mining tailings 97.3%

• South African semi-carbonate ore 100%

• U.S. polymetallic sludge 90.5%

• Industrial waste 68.8%

These yields reflect the variability of actual feedstocks — not controlled laboratory samples. The process also recovers zinc, lead, potassium, and sodium as co-products, improving project economics. Low-impurity manganese output opens the path to battery-grade material suitable for EV precursor production.

Our process uses six times less energy and emits five times less CO₂ than conventional smelting — without generating acid waste or hazardous sludge. This is what makes manganese refining compliant with North American and European environmental standards, rather than the reason it moved offshore.

From Bench to Market: Commercial Momentum in 2025

Validated technology without a customer pipeline is an engineering project. We treated market development as a parallel workstream throughout 2025.

Distribution partnerships established:

• Ocean Partners — agency and offtake agreement for North American distribution

• Scandinavian Steel AB — Letter of Intent for up to 50,000 tonnes per year of metallized manganese pellets (~5–6% of EU manganese ferroalloy imports, representing ~$150M in annual offtake)

Inbound interest has expanded to Japan, India, Turkey, and South Korea. Multiple industrial partners are now advancing toward commercial pilot programs in 2026, driven by two sectors: ferroalloy producers seeking lower-carbon processing alternatives, and deep-sea mining companies looking for efficient processing solutions for unconventional feedstocks.

2025 Milestones

• BC CleanTech Startup Venture of the Year — British Columbia CleanTech Awards

• TRL 5 validated across four distinct feedstock types

• $240,000+ CAD in non-dilutive funding from NorthX and Canadian government programs

• Continental distribution partnerships across North America and Europe

• 200+ industry subscribers; IMnI webinar participation

What Comes Next

The 2026 priority is a continuous pilot plant in British Columbia — 1,500 tonnes per year capacity — designed to validate continuous operation, produce customer qualification samples, and generate engineering data for scale-up. The pilot advances the technology from TRL 5 to TRL 7.

To fund it, we are raising a seed round in H1 2026.

The underlying shift is straightforward: governments and industrial buyers are now treating critical minerals supply chains as infrastructure rather than commodity procurement. The question is no longer whether domestic manganese processing is necessary — it is who builds it first, and on what timeline.