Graphene certainly gets a lot of airplay - it's a sexy new...

Graphene certainly gets a lot of airplay - it's a sexy new product, with extraordinary properties, and it will be really important to our life in the future. So, it will do great things for the graphite market, right?

Sorry, I don't think so.

But everybody is talking about the stuff. Surely it matters?

OK, let's think about it. The current world market for graphite is about one million tonnes per year. To make a significant impact. a new application probably needs to add 10% to that, say 100K tonnes per year.

Graphene is a layer of atoms, one atom thick. That's about one ten-billionth of a metre. It's really spreading the graphite very thinly indeed. To put that thickness another way, a single kilogram of graphene has an area of roughly 500,000 square metres. Unless I've slipped a digit on my calculator, just fifteen thousand tonnes would cover the entire surface of Australia.

Of course, it takes a lot more than one kilo of graphite to make a kilo of graphene, but I just want to make the point that we should be careful to not get carried away by the glamour of the application.


The business question remains: how much extra graphite will SYR (or anybody else) sell as a result?

Cheers, Prime1