Robert Friedland’s Ivanhoe Electric is seeking to raise as much as US$180M from investors with an interest in critical materials for energy transition.

It will be the first North American initial public offering in more than four weeks.  Stock markets have been in decline and conditions are challenging, and so the offering will be a bellwether for both the IPO pipeline and investor support for energy transition investments. 

Ivanhoe Electric plans to list its shares on the Toronto and New York exchanges. Jefferies and Bank of Montreal are leading the offering and if the banks choose to exercise an option to sell additional stock, Ivanhoe Electric could raise more than US$200M.  Mr Friedland is pitching the Vancouver-based company as a dependable, North American supplier of copper and other critical minerals for electric cars and related clean-energy technology. 

The prospectus said that Ivanhoe Electric has a portfolio of mineral projects, mainly focused on copper and other metals needed for the clean energy transition, assembled by Friedland and his team in the past decade.  The company is focused on developing mines from deposits principally in the US, namely in Arizona, Utah and Montana. As such, Ivanhoe Electric will offer investors a chance to get exposure to a growing US upstream critical materials supply chain. 

The USA mines and refines more than 50% of the 40 critical materials scrutinised in Project Blue's Critical Materials Risk Index (CMRI), although security of supply remains a key issue for industry and policymakers in the world’s largest economy given the scale of its downstream manufacturing and end-use markets. The Project Blue CMRI puts 22/40 of the materials scrutinised at medium- or high supply risk for the USA.