RE:RE:perfect storm coming this year for us Demand for graphite (carbon) used as anode material in lithium ion batteries is set to increase by over 200% in the next four years as global cell production surges on the back of maturing pure electric vehicle demand and the inception of the utility storage market.
New data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence forecasts the anode market – which is nearly exclusively served by naturally sourced spherical graphite and synthetically produced graphite – to increase from 80,000 tpa in 2015 to at least 250,000 tpa by the end of 2020 while the market could be as large as 400,000 tpa in the most bullish of cases with no supply restrictions.
Taking the most conservative case, Benchmark estimates that over 360,000 tonnes of medium flake graphite will be needed as a feedstock source for the spherical material by 2020. This is nearly a doubling of the flake concentrate market in 2015 should the natural-to-synthetic demand proportions remain the same in 2020.
Analysing the consumption trends over the last 10 years, there is little doubt that battery consumers prefer naturally sourced graphite which is much lower cost to produce and has a lower environmental impact than synthetic graphite.
However, consistency of supply remains a problem for the material as the feedstock flake graphite is sourced from multiple mines in China, each of which have different raw material ‘signatures’ – impurities that vary from mine to mine.