And as the pieces of the puzzle start to come together, the company’s recent agreement to receive the $5 million in funding from the EBRD has also edged closer, with approval from Kazakh authorities for the deal due by the end of next month.

Sarytogan’s graphite deposit sits in central Kazakhstan, 190km from the industrial city of Karaganda. The project has a long history dating back to Soviet-era exploration in the 1980s.

Since taking up ownership in 2018, the company’s work has uncovered an impressive resource estimate of 229 million tonnes of graphite at 28.9 per cent total graphitic carbon (TGC) at an impressive purity of 99.9992 per cent – otherwise known as the “five 9s” standard – in the mineralisation. Further metallurgical tests revealed a recovery rate of 81.4 per cent for the concentrate.

Armed with its initial resource estimate and successful test results, management then moved forward to conduct a prefeasibility study (PFS), which was released last month. The study has laid out plans to produce 50,000 tonnes of three unique graphite products each year, with a focus on using smaller, modular processes that can easily be scaled up in the future.

The research also confirmed that by tightly packing the micro-crystalline graphite layers through thermal purification and spheroidisation, the final products will be ideal for use as dry lubricants, cathode conductors and anodes in lithium-ion batteries.

As the eyes of the world continue to keep a close watch on the supply of critical metals needed to feed the insatiable desires of the clean-energy transition, Sarytogan has found itself a new status as a bit of a global poster child. And it has high hopes of providing a sizeable and sustainable source of graphite into the critical metals supply chain.

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