Forecast Graphite Pricing

ausheds, I said A$4774/t for advanced processed products (fob Port Adelaide) makes the COP relatively insignificant.
The company is not going to be competing with low cost of production mega projects where low COP is essential to be profitable, and to get finance to build a mine in the first place. We can stop worrying about COP and leave that discussion to TON, SYR etc. If they ever become operational they will produce the big tonnage cheaply whereas VXL will be selling a much smaller tonnage aimed at specific high tech uses and selling at 4 to 5 times more per tonne. Main competition for VXL in the next few years is the vein graphite is currently only mined in Sri Lanka and in the future Canada Carbon. Their Miller property has indicated extremely high grades similar to the lump or vein-like properties in Sri Lanka.
The next step for VXL will to prove up products for high tech use, eg to show that their graphite is suitable for nuclear applications. Price of nuclear graphite is around $6 K per tonne. China is now building the first Pebble Bed reactor and plans to build to up to 20 more by 2030. Each Pebble Bed Reactor is estimated to require 300 tonnes of graphite at start up and subsequently 60 to 100 tonnes annually to operate. Meanwhile the United States will install up to 500 new 100 GW reactors by 2020. These reactors will require approximately 400,000 tonnes of graphite which is equal to the current global production of flake graphite excluding the requirement from the rest of the world for reactors, Li-Ion batteries and other applications. There is a range of high tech applications that the company will need to prove their product for but with the high grades indicated so far they should have no difficulties in doing that. Then we can look forward to very good profits based on highly processed small volumes of mineral.