The following is a Stockhouse Q&A interview with Dr. Ian Flint, VP of Processing and Refining at Elcora Resources Corp. (TSX:V.ERA, Stock Forum)
Graphite has been around as an object of value since the Neolithic age, when it was used in paints to decorate pottery. In the 1500’s it was used to mark sheep. In the 1600’s, it helped make cannonballs smoother.
We’ve come a long way since then. Now, graphite is used in batteries, brake linings, lubricants, in making steel stronger, it’s used in blast furnace linings, for refractories, electric motor brushes, heat sinks in laptops… it’s kind of a big deal.
But it ain’t nothing on graphene.
So what’s graphene?
According to Dr Ian Flint, VP of Processing and Refining at Elcora Resources, graphene is a single layer of graphite which, in tension, is around 400 times the strength of steel.
“In conductivity, it’s a thousand better than copper, coming close to superconductor levels,” says Flint.
Obviously those are two qualities that make graphene very much in demand, and the fact that there’s so little of it available means what little there is out there is worth a lot of money.
The use of graphene in electronics only amounts to a few kilograms a year, because a little bit can go a long way. And because it costs around $200 a gram.
“Take a single layer of graphene, says Flint. “It’s one of the most opaque materials known, it absorbs light very well. At one layer thick, it’s transparent, but 15 layers brings the clouding where it starts to absorb light. You only need one layer to give you the strength you need or conductivity on things that wouldn’t normally be conductive.”
Elcora management says it has a 40% equity stake in a mining project featuring graphite that it is abundantly useful for graphene. In fact, they think they’re potentially sitting on a load of it.
“We’re more interested in the bulk uses of graphene, where it doesn’t have to be a perfect crystal,” says Dr. Flint. “But it’s pretty expensive, and just not sustainable to use in a bulk basis with the processes available to produce it currently. To be viable as a bulk product, it has to come down significantly, to around 40c-50c a gram. We think we can get there.”
The prime use for graphene is in composites, says Dr. Flint. “Put it into plastics, like you do graphite fibre or fibreglass, and then you’re imparting the strength of graphene into plastic.
Graphite fibre is synthetic; it has a lot of carbon in it, so it doesn’t have the same kind of chemical bonds and only the outside layers bind to the plastic, and you’re only getting strength a couple of times of steel instead of the full potential. Graphene gives the full potential, plastic with hundreds of times strength of steel, as an estimate.”
Weight savings are another benefit of graphene. The bottom of a Tesla car contains graphite. But if you used PET plastic – which is used to make drinking bottles - with graphene, you’d have more strength with about 20% of the weight.
“You can imagine the applications for the aerospace industry, military, automobiles, all sorts of things.”
I ask Dr. Flint about what might happen to a tank made of graphene infused steel when it is hit by an IED, and he notes that it’s wisest to actually build in some point of failure in such an instance “or else you’re going to crush people 200 yards away with a flying tank.”
The second application Elcora is interested in is to produce 3D printing ink out of graphene, “which means you could print very complicated shapes, circuits, and products stronger and more conductive than anything else out there.”
The third application, if it comes about, would mean the end of lithium ion batteries.
Says Dr. Flint, “There is a type of energy device called a field effect capacitor, or a hyper capacitor, which stores energy like a capacitor instead of using chemical reaction. This means it can be charged as fast as the electrons can get into it, which means basically an instant charge on a cellphone.”
Did you get that? Plug in your cellphone and – blink – it’s charged.
This is a technology that could change things in ways not seen since the digital watch.
“You couldn’t charge cars as fast as that because you don’t want to melt your wires on that kind of energy blasting through them all at once,” says Dr. Flint.
Unless maybe you’re using graphene wiring…?
Hyper capacitors generally use carbon black as a storage medium and have the capacity to hold about 5% of a lithium battery, but replace that carbon black with graphene and the storage is the same.
“If we can get the price down to where we want, you’d get it at half the price of an existing battery,” says Dr. Flint.
The process of creating graphene, says the doc, is easy. The secret to doing it effectively, and comparatively cheaply, is in the graphite you use as a source material.
Elcora management consider theirs to be the best graphite in the world for the large graphene flakes needed for field effect capacitors and structural composites.
“You won’t get small flakes here, you’d need another mine for that,” says Dr. Flint, “but the large stuff we have. When you smash up graphite to get it liberated from its host material you are ruining the graphite crystal, and the graphene crystal, so you want the process to be done as easily as possible. 80% of the material out there is around 300 microns in size.
The flakes we’re dealing with are a size measured in millimetres.”
Of course, to get to a place where the graphene can emerge, Elcora needs to put together a graphene plant which can allow the company to purify the graphite itself.
The company says they can do that in 9 months to a year, and if early tests come back as expected, they can build mine production in parallel, within 18 months.
“We’d build in a modular fashion so we could build out as applications are accepted,” says Dr. Flint. “A few tons of graphene would be enough to build 5000 cars. We’d aim for kilograms of production at first, then tons, and then if we can get to thousands of tons, it would mean revolutionizing several industries.”
What’s making management at Elcora happy is that, even without graphene as an exponential upside, they’ll have a mine in parallel that can deliver 99.99% graphite and be driving ongoing revenue.
“A lot of the companies we’re looking to be selling to on that side are also on the graphene side,” says Elcroa CEO Troy Grant, “So even if the graphene push didn’t happen, we’ll still have a profitable business. With bulk graphite and sheet graphite, we can get up into the $15k-$20k per ton with little added value thrown in. The graphene thing is perfect because we don’t have to invest a lot extra to get into that area.”
Competitors in the space will need to get down with a $90m capex, says the company, while Elcora’s 40% owned Sakura mine in Sri Lanka is already in production.
“We have all parts of the supply chain,” says Grant. “A lot of graphene companies you see, they’re buying from different sources and have no control over the quality of the resource. We can make sure the profits are optimized right from the mine onwards, and control exactly what product we’re working with.”
“Frankly, it has to be done together, or it can’t be done. We already have the money for the first mill. We’ve taken the risk out of it, I’m not sure the others have. We want to have partnerships with the most advanced companies and users, but there’s only so much time in the day and we’re only so big, so if we can partner up with the right end users in non-exclusive agreements, that’d be a strong model with cradle to grave supply chains secured.
When I ask the company elder if they have enough graphene to go around, an enthusiastic nod follows.
“We have 8 square kilometres plotted out of the 200 we have access to,” says Grant.
“When the mine was first ventured into, the Sri Lankans dug for 150 metres and then stopped because, with their mining techniques, they were running out of air, but they hadn’t hit near the end of the vein.”
At the other end of the region, government-backed mines are 600 metres down and still going strong, and have been for decades. Dr. Flint says, with Canadian technology and the potentially large resource, and an endless supply of inexpensive local labour, and industry becoming more and more dependent on a substance found in few places on the planet, this is one project they’re in to for the long haul.
--Chris Parry
https://www.twitter.com/ChrisParry
FULL DISCLOSURE: Elcora Resources is a Stockhouse Publishing client