ZEN Graphene Solutions recently shared several updates. The first is that Zen has closed its recent private placement of flow-through common shares of the company and reports that it was oversubscribed. The company raised CAD$1.21 million (around USD$920,300) in respect of the offering, which will be used to finance the 2020 environmental baseline field program and community engagement work on the company's Albany graphite project.
In addition, the Company announced that it is moving forward with graphene production and anticipates that small-scale graphene related production will commence before the end of Q1 2020. The first batch of equipment for the purification small-scale pilot plant was already delivered. In the coming months, ZEN is aiming to setup small-scale graphite purification and graphene-related production facilities including Graphene Quantum Dots (GQDs) and Graphene Oxide (GO). These products will be available for research and development, application development and for commercial use.
The Company together with an industrial collaborator in the aluminum business are jointly supporting a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Alliance grant application by Dr. Lukas Bichler, a materials engineer from the University of British Columbia in Okanagan. This application followed promising results earlier this year where Dr. Bichler and his team used ZEN’s graphene products in aluminum alloys. NSERC recently approved the $450,000, three-year Alliance grant.