Exit, page-54

WOW you seem too pessimistic about graphite investment. I dont think Syrah building and commissioning of its project will go as smoothly as the company thinks it will be . Its a huge project where anything can go wrong. It will take time before they could ramp up production to achieve high recovery rates, high purity and high amounts of production.

I will be really suprised if they could sell into the market just 10.000tpa at 94%+ purity in 2017. 200.000tpa ? (half the flake world market today at 400.000tpa) not a chance IMO, maybe by 2020 after years of trial and error. However I am not worried if they are able to prouduce 200.000tpa in 2020, because by then graphite demand would have increased by 400.000 (due to spherical graphite as anodes in the batteries) so still a gap between supply and demand, and more capacity is needed.

The issue is really that demand is higher than supply for the foreseeable future. If anyone can produce high quality consistency of graphite, they will encounter no problem selling it into the market for battery anodes to substitute the more expensive synthetic graphite.

I wrote a short post on this issue in linked-in here : titled :
Spherical graphite : Huge Demand, Lack of Supply, the race is ON

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sphe...and-lack-supply-race-doctor-fouad?published=t

My conclusion was :

Conclusion :
So either graphite suppliers accelerate their efforts to supply the burgeoning spherical graphite market (there is no lack of natural flake graphite deposits to be mined, but rather a lack of purification, spheoridizing and coating of graphite processing facilities), or graphite miners would miss the transport electrification revolution and continue relying on the poor demand drived from the steel industry for their product.
Its a race and the clock is ticking, battery manufacturers wont wait.