RE: Lokimo mentioned in this blogThe Gold Report:
Source: Brian Sylvester of The Critical Metals Report (4/17/12)
TCMR: One of the graphite derivatives that is very misunderstood is graphene, which is a single layer of graphite that is created in labs. How close is the industry to commercial-scale graphene production?
SM: The industry is some way off. A Google search will throw up many companies claiming they can produce graphene. But I wouldn't call it graphene—I'd call it nano-graphite. There may be three, four, five layers of graphene in their products.
Graphene is used in intelligent inks, for example, which are used for security systems on bank cards. That's its first market, and others may emerge in the next few years. But I believe the production of true graphene is many years away—commercially producing true graphene one-molecule thick—is extremely challenging, one of the biggest materials scientists will face. But if they crack it, the possibilities for its use are almost endless and it would revolutionize they way we live our lives. But to get graphene's super properties we all read about, you need to peel away and isolate a one-molecule layer. It's almost impossible to do that on a commercial scale. In terms of serious large-scale commercial use, it's at least 15 years away, and predicting 15 years into the future is like trying to predict 1,500 years into the future.