Iron Ore Analogy is on a Massive Millions of Tonne/year Commodity with Supply being matched to Demand often,usually,most of the time.
The Pilbra is a Region not a mine. Mines there have say 20 years mine life. Saw a graph once comparing production out of World Class Commodity Metals IO,Copper,Zinc,Nickel,Gold,Uranium all of them and it showed production out of these World Class Super Pits was at TOPS around 10% of yearly global except SYR got photoshopped into the bar graph with 18% for Graphite Market TOTAL drawing the inference that it's projection of market share was lets say ambitious?
Now you argue/make the point that we do not know the growth rate in Graphite Demand in the future won't be spectacular and that SYR projection dropped to the mean average 10%.
Though you acknowledge the Batteries may upgrade tech to not need graphite.make it redundant thus taking batteries out of the spectacular growth.
The other current graphite darling is graphene. Yet there is No Supporting Evidence that Graphene will require million tonnes of graphite or 100;s of kt's next 5/10 years.That's why the few boutique graphiters in Canada,Aus and Sweden are directly involved with research and current manufacturers and users of graphene. They may be able to sell 1/5/10 tonnes of their specialist,unique gear to them.
Certainly there is no talk,dream of flogging 100kt package to the Graphene Industry in even China let alone the West.
Meteor the market for new production graphite is in substituting for spherical,
substituting for chinese euro/jap sth korea imports
and substituting for chinese internal demand
while the Chinese rejig their mining methods,adopt green methods,close down their small inefficient mines,'discover' new domestic reserves to bring into operation
and then power off again into dominating the World Market again out of their own homeland World Class Region.It's estimated that Chinese ReJig may do the great leap forward in about 5 years.
so making decisions on how many kt's of production each of the graphite race contenders is proposing is justified imho and other than to the Chinese no companies are projecting a Market that can or will absorb 1/200kts/annum at least announced so far.
just this afternoon I queried the Telsa deal 100kts being required by one industry expert to be only one mine sourced, read about it down there with any reply.
thanks for the considered,considerate reply meteor.
over the yard arm. will be incommunicado til tomorrow.
TON Price at posting:
35.0¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
