It's not about abundance. Availability isn't the issue. It's the...

It's not about abundance. Availability isn't the issue. It's the quality and cost to take it there. Anybody can achieve 99% purity. But if what you get out of the ground is at a 90% purity, your costs to take it to 99% would be much greater than those already pulling out out at 98%. Furthermore, it's the potential environmental consequences (or lack there of) of cleaning natural graphite to those standards. And then there's the size of the flake. All in all, we're sitting on the best product on the market. Predominately large and jumbo, easy, cheap a fast cleaning. High purity. Almost no environmental effects. The purity of synthetic for the cost of natural with no environmental issues? I can think of a few people who might be interested in that. Once the mine is up and running, oh dear...