Mr. Anthony Huston reports

GRAPHITE ONE ENGAGES AMES NATIONAL LABORATORY TO ASSESS RARE EARTH RECOVERIES FROM ALASKA'S GRAPHITE CREEK DEPOSIT

Graphite One Inc. has started a research program with Ames National Laboratory to assess and optimize a sustainable process for recovering rare earth elements from garnet material from the company's Graphite Creek deposit near Nome, Alaska.

The work, conducted under a strategic partnership project agreement, will examine garnet preparation and characterization, acid leaching, separation of HREE rare earth elements from light rare earth elements, and product purification. The program is financed by Graphite One. The program is intended to develop a preliminary scalable flow sheet and evaluate its mass balance, reagent use, water consumption and waste generation. The three-month project will commence immediately.

"Graphite Creek's garnets host rare earth elements, including the heavy rare earths and magnet metals that are critical to U.S. technology and the defense industrial base," said Anthony Huston, president and chief executive officer of Graphite One. "Partnering with Ames National Laboratory, the Department of Energy's premier rare earths research institution with more than 75 years of expertise, gives us a rigorous, independent path to assess their recovery potential. Our objective is clear: to determine how much additional value these rare earths can add to what is already the largest natural graphite deposit in the United States."

Ames Lab Graphite One REE work plan

The Ames Lab program will begin with mineralogical and chemical characterization of the Graphite Creek garnet material, comminution and mechanochemical activation, followed by preliminary acid leaching tests. Subsequent work will optimize leaching conditions and screen separation approaches, including solvent extraction, stepwise pH adjustment and fractional crystallization. The final phase will assess precipitation and purification of REE group products and prepare an integrated flow sheet and mass balance.

Graphite Creek REE potential

The Ames Lab program follows earlier work conducted in 2025 by Graphite One in which garnet grains were mechanically separated from crushed Graphite Creek drill core samples at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and analyzed for REE concentrations by Activation Laboratories.

ActLabs found that 85 per cent of the REEs in the tested garnet material were magnet or heavy rare earths. The analysis reported dysprosium concentrations of 32 to 63 parts per million yttrium and scandium of 84 to 141 ppm. Graphite Creek garnets appeared to host much of the HREEs, scandium and yttrium. The separated garnet fraction showed two to six times higher REE concentrations than the remaining material.

Graphite One's U.S. supply chain strategy

Graphite One is advancing a vertically integrated domestic graphite strategy designed to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign-sourced graphite and establish an American supply chain extending from raw material through advanced material manufacturing.

The company's strategy includes:

• Mining and processing natural graphite at Graphite Creek, Alaska;
• Transporting graphite materials through the Port of Nome;
• Manufacturing advanced graphite and anode materials in Ohio;
• Potential co-located recycling of graphite and other battery materials.

This integrated approach is designed to establish a domestic supply chain spanning resource development, advanced material manufacturing and potential recycling -- supporting the development of a circular U.S. graphite material economy -- and continues to remain subject to project financing.

About Graphite One Inc.

Graphite One continues to develop its Graphite One project with the goal of becoming an American producer of high-grade anode materials that is integrated with a domestic graphite resource. The project is proposed as a vertically integrated enterprise to mine and process natural graphite and to manufacture synthetic and natural graphite anode active materials primarily for the lithium-ion electric vehicle battery and energy storage markets.

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