In exchange for preferred access to the proprietary battery technology, Rio Tinto has pledged a cash investment of $6 million.

The story here, of course, is the battery maker.

The First True 21st-Century Battery Is Here

Despite being a relative no-name in the battery business, this Brisbane-based company leads a pack of larger competitors in the race for a proper successor to lithium ion as the global rechargeable battery standard.

What this company plans to do will completely redefine rechargeable batteries as we know them today.

Rather than improving and redesigning existing concepts, this company chose to go a completely different route and created a cathode with no lithium to speak of, replacing it instead with a space-age nanostructure that’s 100% man-made and manufactured in-house, with the novel production method patent-protected.

This results in not only a quantum leap ahead in terms of battery performance, as mentioned above, but also a potential decoupling from China as the world’s No. 1 supplier of lithium and lithium-ion batteries.

The benefits are many, with none of the drawbacks.

Install one of these new batteries in an electric vehicle and the range will jump to over 1,000 miles, with overall battery life extending into the 1 million–1.5 million-mile range.

Charging will take less than a minute, immediately erasing the No. 1 hurdle cited by would-be first time EV buyers: charge delay.

These batteries will never catch fire. They will never explode. You will drive your car into the ground, wearing out every other major system before charge capacity decays by even 1%.

Lithium-Ion Battery Market to Cross Quarter-Trillion-Dollar Threshold by 2030

That’s how good they are, and that’s why a massive multinational resource corporation like Rio Tinto would be champing at the bit to get a hold of the technology.

If these new cathodes deliver on the promise — and there's plenty of testing already on the books to indicate that they will — the entire lithium-ion battery market, projected to be worth over $270 billion by the end of the decade, will be under direct fire.

That means today might be the speculator's best and last chance buy in at pre-commercialization share prices.