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Australia’s only integrated producer and refiner of natural graphite, a key metal used in the batteries that power electric vehicles, says it will avoid the meltdown roiling the nickel and lithium sector and is tying its growth to carmakers in the United States and Europe.
Syrah Resources managing director Shaun Verner said the global race between the US, Europe and China to capture and exploit the critical minerals needed to underpin the globe’s energy transition is creating opportunities for his company.
Chinese manufacturers coat, carbonise and furnace-treat graphite to make battery anodes.Credit:
Rare earths and elements like copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite are essential to the electrical conduits, batteries, magnets, circuitry and other components that power electric vehicles, defence applications and modern energy networks.
Syrah, a $414 million mining minnow listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, extracts natural graphite at its Balama project in Mozambique, and processes the concentrate in a newly built $US102 million US refining facility in Louisiana, where it is turned into the precursor material used to manufacture anodes – a negative electrode that is one of the essential parts of a battery.
The Louisiana facility, partially funded by the US government, started first production just two weeks ago. It churns out a graphite sphere which manufacturers – predominantly Chinese and Japanese – process further by coating, carbonising and furnace-treating, before using the final product to make the anodes.
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Until now, China has dominated production and supply of anodes. About 90 per cent of global supply is made by the Asian powerhouse, with the rest manufactured in Japan or Korea, using precursor material from China.
“The whole anode supply chain globally is reliant on China,” Verner said. “This [Louisiana facility] essentially gives the US market the first independent, integrated anode material that’s not reliant on China.”
It is a critical piece of the mineral supply chain jigsaw that the Biden administration’s big-ticket $US391 billion Inflation Reduction Act and the Albanese government’s critical mineral strategy are intent on changing.