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The dream Chris Burns has had since 2017 of looking at electric vehicles on the road and knowing they’re powered by materials he developed is a step closer to reality. 

Burns is the CEO of Novonix, headquartered in Halifax, where 80 people work at sites at the Bluewater and Burnside industrial parks. 

“In Bedford we have all our battery pilot lines, cell testing and development work that we do as a service to the industry, and also to support our anode materials group and our cathode materials team,” he said in an interview on Monday in Bedford.

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“In Burnside, we have another site where we have our hardware business, which is the original business I started in 2013, where we sell testing equipment. We’ve also made big investments over the last few years to scale up the technology we developed with Dalhousie and our partnership with Dr. Mark Obrovac, in making cathode materials, basically the other side of the battery.” 

In 2017, Burns set up an anode materials group in Chattanooga, Tenn., where the Novonix footprint is larger than in Nova Scotia, and from where production of materials destined for Panasonic is to start next year. 

“Providing material to Panasonic, that’s really the culmination of seven years of work it’s taken to develop, scale, industrialize and deploy this new technology. That’s really what’s going to be transformational for us, entering the market in a big way with these Tier 1 off-takes that we have,” he said, noting that Panasonic is in partnership with several EV makers, including Tesla, where Burns worked for two years. 

Also in Chattanooga, Novonix has constructed a development site of 120,000 square feet and a mass production site that will start up next year, covering about 400,000 square feet. 

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And last week, the company learned it had qualified for a loan of just over three quarters of a billion dollars from the U.S. federal government for the construction of a synthetic graphite plant in Tennessee. 

“It’s been a process we’ve been going through for a number of years, to reach this stage. If you look at the (Department of Energy), they stated we reached ‘substantially complete’ in May of last year. And it still took until December of this year to reach this critical milestone of conditional commitment. We’ve been working with the Loan Programs office for several years planning this project,” Burns said, adding that the loan comes on the heels of a $100 million grant from DOE and a $103 million tax credit allocated earlier this year, and signals American faith in the Novonix work. 

“All of that money will be spent on that new planned site that … will be in Chattanooga, that loan is very specific to that project.” 

Burns has estimated his company could produce 50,000 tonnes of battery-grade synthetic graphite per year by 2028, with production starting next year.  

Novonix is a publicly listed company traded on the Australian stock exchange that Burns said, at its core, remains a materials and technology development company. 

“Within that, a number of entities: the synthetic graphite business is based in the U.S. and the battery technology solutions based in Canada, and within the battery technology group we basically have three areas of focus – the service business, where we build and test batteries for people, the hardware business, where we build and sell test equipment to companies around the world, and the third, where we look to develop new ideas, new IT, new technology, which has grown into what is our cathode team now.” 

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