I had thought that because of its graphene potential Talga Resources Ltd (ticker TLG, price 35¢, mkt cap $49m) would be the best performer of all of the ASX-listed graphite companies, but MRL now looks far superior.
Here is a quick comparison:
In September 2014 Talga released the results of a scoping study based on an opencut mine at a 4:1 strip ratio producing 250,000 tpa ore grading some 24% total graphitic carbon (TGC). The process plant would upgrade this to 40,000 tpa of graphite concentrate grading 80-85% purity (which could be sold for $480/t) and 7,000 tpa of graphene grading 99.9% purity. However, it was thought that only a limited tonnage of the graphene could actually be sold as graphene because of the limited market for the material at this pioneering stage of the industry, and Talga assumed, for the sake of the exercise, that 1,000 tpa would be sold as graphene with the remainder sold as high quality graphite priced at US$1,600/t. That would result in annual project revenues of some US$84m. Capital cost was put at around $30m. Operating costs were put at $84/t of feed (i.e. $21m annually) and that included processing costs.
MRL could achieve revenue of US$75m from mining say 5,000 tpa (continuing with the example provided by CPS Capital) and producing 1,000 tpa graphene priced at US$55,000/t and 4,000 tpa of high quality battery grade graphite priced at US$5,000/t, at a capital cost probably well under $10m, at much lower operating costs (a cost of US$600/t for the raw graphite would amount to $3m annually, to which must be added the cost of processing) and probably earlier to boot.
