Croc is delusional is he believes the entire global supply of expandable graphite will come Lindi.
Just recently he made a post (where he borrowed a slide from one of GPX presentation packs, lol), that quoted Mr Jiang Yang (who is the Group Vice President of China National Building Materials and President of the China Building Materials Application TechnologyResearch Institute), where Mr Jiang stated during his presentation at the graphite industry and graphite building materials conference held in China (Dec 2017) that...
"
Chinaneeds 40 million tonnes of fire retardant building materials per annum, which will contain 5% expandablegraphite.”
In other words, 2 million tonnes of expandable graphite is required per annum.
Then you have oznt's PDF summary on WKT, where oznt states...
"With anticipated legislation changes around the world that figure is predicted to double (4 Mil TPA)"
Now if Croc actually believes in what he posts, ask him where the shortfall in supply of expandable graphite will come from in order to satisfy the projected demand just in the FRBM sector, (let alone all the other uses of expandable graphite).
Croc doesn't believe the vanilla graphite stocks will get funding in the short to medium term (and I agree with him on that) given the low basket price for fine flake (battery grade graphite) especially with SYR producing below plant capacity. But where Croc's argument falls apart is when he states that the only other graphite company that is targeting the expandable graphite sector (GPX) will also not achieve funding.
So according to his logic, if no one is able to secure funding (apart from his beloved WKT) in either the vanilla stocks, or in the case of GPX (again, which is geared towards the expandable market), then where is the 2-4MT per annum of expandable graphite going to come from???
Are there other graphite stock targeting the expandable graphite sector that Croc is aware of that will make up the short fall? If so, I would like to hear which ones.
Below is a slide from WKT latest presentation pack which quantifies the product split of the 40,000 TPA of produced graphite from Lindi.
25,000t/40,000t is targeting the expandable markets, with only 10,000t allocated for fire retardant materials.
To put that in perspective, WKT's 10,000t allocation to FRM is equivalent to
0.5% of the demand that Mr Jiang states will be needed per annum for FRBM (just in China alone).
Again, ask Croc,
where the extra 99.5% supply shortfall in expandable graphite will come from?
Below is a quote from a GPX announcement putting into context the significance of what Mr Jiang stated...
..."we estimated total global production of flake graphite in 2016 at around 860,000tonnes and not all of this material is able to generate expandable graphite. It is commonly understood thatChina’s coarse flake graphite reserves have largely diminished and supply is also under threat byenvironmental restrictions forcing mine closures.
This scale of expandable graphite demand vastlyexceeds all estimates we have previously received. To put this level of graphite demand in perspective, it ismore than 10 times greater than existing natural graphite demand from the lithium ion battery industry andmost commodity analysts aren’t predicting battery graphite demand to reach this level until 2025-2030. Theexciting part about the flame retardant market is it is not dependent on the rate of electric vehicle take-up, itis here now. Another key differentiator is the potential value to graphite producers – batteries require lowervalue fine flake graphite while flame retardants require higher value coarser flake graphite."
(20min delay)