While graphite appears to have come out of nowhere to become the new love of the junior-mining investment community, it is an important industrial material with a wide range of uses.
Graphite has long been used as a lubricant, as a liner for furnaces, crucibles and lades in the steel industry, and in fire retardants, heat shields and brake pads. It is also used in pebble-bed nuclear reactors, photovoltaic cells for solar panels, carbon fibers, fuel cells and in so-called lithium-ion battery cells which, the expandable graphite project developers are always quick to say, contain far more graphite than they do lithium.
It is this latter application, plus the potential of the next-generation wonder material graphene produced from sheets of carbon atoms just a single atom thick, that is driving the interest in new sources of natural-graphite supply. Graphite can be synthesized from coal and petroleum products, and synthetic flake graphite is used for a variety of the above applications. However, batteries and other growing uses of graphite frequently require the type of morphology only found in naturally occurring forms of graphite.
Three forms of natural graphite are of industrial interest. That is flake, amorphous and lump. So-called large-flake, high-purity graphite is of greatest interest to graphite junior-mining companies, analogous in some ways to the desire to find rare-earth deposits rich in the heavy rare earths. Large-flake graphite is of particular interest for the production of lithium-ion batteries.
Flexible graphite sheet, flexible graphite roll are widely used in the fields of petroleum and chemical industry, refining, electric power, metallurgy, machinery, papermaking, automobile, shipping building, pharmacy, aerospace industry, nuclear industry, etc.
Flexible graphite sheet and roll, namely expanded graphite sheet and roll, is made from flake graphite with high carbon content which is gone through chemical treatment, expanding under high temperature and then rolling. It has the characteristics of high temperature resistance, corrosion resistance and good elasticity, and is the basic material for making all kinds of reinforced graphite sheets, graphite tapes, packing and sealing gaskets.