DrWolowitz - the businesses you are referring to are not yet businesses.... what will they be selling? who will they be selling to? no answers to those questions at present. I have no methodology for assessing any of them until they are operating businesses.
Returning to the natural-v-synthetic argument. It's a bogus argument in reality. It can be argued that the difference between them is merely the choice of feedstock. Synthetic graphite uses petroleum coke as a base, natural graphite needing to be processed uses mined natural graphite. Either way there's a lot of refinement and reprocessing to be done to get to the end product of a graphite anode. (By the way, the poster who reported that synthetic graphite has a purity of only 90% needs to do a lot more homework.) There's nothing 'natural' about a natural graphite anode except that it originated with natural graphite. At the end of the day, both are 'synthetic' products requiring a great deal of non-natural processes to achieve the end goal.
Another poster implied that natural graphite was clean and green, oh yeah?....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/graphite-mining-pollution-in-china/
One thing in the debate about the future of transport is indisputable: current power sources using hydrocarbon fuels will inevitably disappear. There are no more major oil fields akin to the Middle East to be discovered. That's a geological fact. Not to mention concerns about climate effects with any known method of producing power, even solar, when all the inputs are factored in. Just for the record: the efficiency of a conventional powered vehicle is approx.20%, that of an electric vehicle whose power recharging source originates from conventional power plants is approx.26%.
Where all that leaves VRC and the like remains at present a mystery. Huge amounts of money are being spent on battery research and who's to say that graphite will be the anode of choice once the dust settles? In the meantime the industry will muddle through with Lithium Ion batteries and all that that entails.
For VRC punters there are few indications about which way it will turn IMO. It got a late start and has a direct competitor a few kilometres up the road. I won't get into any argument about MNS/VRC but they are both proposing to mine exactly the same stuff - they are mining the same geology so to speak.
I don't know how many times I've said it, but the market is all about money and nothing else. The Company which can bring the most money to the table wins. On that basis, until VRC is able to talk about money and not the flake size of its graphite, it won't be going anywhere IMO, nor will any of the others.
(20min delay)