Why investors are betting on sulfur to power the next generation of defence kit

Imagine a battery that swaps scarce metals for sulfur, one of the cheapest and most plentiful materials on earth.

That is the pitch from Gelion, the London-listed battery technology company, whose cathode material could suit drones, defence kit and aerospace.

The cathode is the part of a battery that stores charge, and today's versions rely on critical minerals that are costly to mine and tricky to source. 

Gelion's sulfur alternative is designed to slot into existing factories, which would spare manufacturers from rebuilding their production lines.

Investors piled in this week, pushing the shares up 55 per cent, after the National Laboratory of the Rockies, a US Department of Energy research centre, reproduced Gelion's results. The lab built its own cells from Gelion's material, and they held 92 per cent of their capacity when the charging speed was raised 20-fold.

Gelion plans to sell the material to other battery makers, who will want proof it works outside the company's own labs. The tests used coin cells, the smallest format, so larger prototypes are the next hurdle.

A brutal week for growth

Turning to the wider market, it has been a fairly brutal week for growth stocks, with the AIM All-Share down 3 per cent as the tech sell-off in the US and global political uncertainty triggered a retreat from the riskier end of the market. Its benchmark, the FTSE 100, fell 2 per cent.

Sticking with the week's winners, a presentation and interview with an industry expert appeared to put the wind in the sails of Pulsar Helium, which jumped 29 per cent.

Ixico, the brain imaging specialist, advanced 26 per cent after it raised revenue expectations. The icing on the cake came a couple of days later when it landed a £1.5million contract to supply its expertise to an Alzheimer's trial.

Landmark for Metals One

It has been a landmark week for Metals One. It signed a term sheet to acquire full ownership of Lions Bay Resources, bringing under its control the Barbrook Gold Mine in South Africa's Mpumalanga Province and the KC Energy Cogeneration Power Plant in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal.

CREST Corporate Services has come up with a sum-of-the-parts valuation that suggests the enlarged group is worth just shy of £107million, or 6.1p a share. The stock, up 20 per cent this week, is changing hands for 1.46p.

Big raises, bigger ambitions

The week's list of fallers was headed by two companies raising comparatively significant sums from the junior market. 

The idea is that companies discount their shares to bring in new investment, so mechanically this leads to a drop in the price. But the net impact over the longer term is that the capital is put to use creating significant value.

For Cornish Metals, down 26 per cent, the money, some £135million, will be going directly into the ground to develop the South Crofty tin project. As eye-catching as the headline figure was, another number jumped out: the £11.2million contributed by Glencore, the FTSE 100 miner and metal trader. It is one of a host of big-name backers of the Cornish build-out.

The £35million raised by battery company Invinity Energy Systems suggests its backers have faith in its ability to turn the technology into a viable product, even if the shares ended the week 36 per cent lower.

The fuel of the future, still waiting

Finally, green hydrogen has been the fuel of the future for so long that sceptics could be forgiven for thinking it will stay that way.

The economics have never quite worked. The technology has been too expensive, too inefficient, or both. And the big players in the energy sector have been watching and waiting rather than committing.

Hydrogen Solutions, a London-based company founded by James Busche, thinks it has the answer. Its H2 HotBox is a dual-mode solid oxide device that can produce green hydrogen from water and renewable electricity, then run in reverse to generate clean power from that stored hydrogen. 

One box, two jobs, and a claimed efficiency well above anything currently on the market.

Still in its embryonic phase, the company hopes to emulate British hydrogen successes such as ITM Power and Ceres Power, which began on AIM before moving up the food chain. Broker CREST Corporate Broking believes the technology could be worth 366 per cent upside on the current share price.

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