While it has always been the mantra of industrial mineral producers to constantly evolve their mineral grades and evaluate potential new applications, it’s not often that a discovery is made of a completely new kind of material with quite outstanding properties.
This has been the case with graphene, and while the jury is still out on its commercial scale capabilities, rapid and growing research and development on its manufacture and wealth of applications is generating a wave of serious excitement among the science community and, with exquisite timing, the graphite industry.
With graphite as the source raw material, the “G-word” was mentioned a fair bit during the recent IM Graphite Conference held in London, 6-7 December 2011. Right now, there are a number of reasons why the world needs new graphite sources quite quickly, and among them graphene features high on the list of drivers for the plethora...