Gelion (AIM:GELN) said its Australian subsidiary, Gelion Technologies Pty, has been approved by the Australian Department of Defence as an AUKUS Authorised User, granting it access to the AUKUS Licence-Free Environment.
The London-listed sulfur battery technology company said the approval reduces potential export licensing friction and can shorten qualification cycles with defence partners across Australia, the UK and the US.
AUKUS is the trilateral security partnership between the three countries, and the Licence-Free Environment removes the requirement to obtain individual Australian export permits for eligible items on the Defence and Strategic Goods List transferred between member states, subject to eligibility criteria and pre-notification requirements.
Gelion is developing its Nano-Encapsulated Sulfur (NES™) cathode material as a low-cost, drop-in replacement for the nickel and cobalt used in conventional lithium-ion battery cathodes, using sulfur that it describes as abundant, mining-free and free from supply chain constraints.
The company has been building a defence-facing validation track record alongside its automotive work: QinetiQ completed independent cell build and testing of NES™ lithium-sulfur pouch cells in August under the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK-funded Advanced Route to Market Demonstrator 4 programme, and the National Laboratory of the Rockies in the US reported independent validation of NES™ material last month, with test cells retaining 92% of reference capacity despite a 20-fold increase in cycling rate.
Gelion said defence customers increasingly prefer suppliers able to operate inside the AUKUS licence-free environment, and that the approval forms part of the regulatory infrastructure needed to support its engagement with defence customers and industry partners across all three AUKUS markets.
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"With our partners, we have demonstrated that our NES™ cathode active materials is a great fit for defence applications, and the AUKUS framework is designed to enable closer collaboration on strategically important defence technologies across Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States," said chief executive Matt Wood.
The company said the approval does not itself determine whether any particular Gelion product, technology or service is controlled under the Defence and Strategic Goods List or eligible for the licence-free environment, with each proposed transfer remaining subject to classification, eligibility, end-user, location and pre-notification requirements.