PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Graphite hopeful Talga Resources would spend A$1-million to construct a graphene demonstration plant in central Germany.
The plant would produce between 100 t/y and 200 t/y of graphene, with feedstock sourced from Talga’s Swedish projects.
“The decision to proceed with a demonstration plant followed Talga’s success in moving its high-grade Swedish graphite ores from laboratory to bench top scale and replicating graphene process results in multiple countries with several parties,” said Talga MD Mark Thompson.
“The next stage of development will expand to a locked-cycle demonstration scale plant able to produce meaningful quantities of graphene and by-product graphite for larger customer samples and material graphene sales in 2015.”
Thompson said that pending a final design, the new plant had the potential to be one of the largest graphene production facilities in Europe.
Pending Swedish trial mining approval in the second quarter of this year, graphite ore from Sweden would be transported directly to the demonstration plant for maiden processing in the third quarter of this year.
Talga had originally anticipated establishing the pilot scale plant in northern Sweden, close to the graphite deposits; however, the company noted that the opportunity existed to produce larger samples creating the imperative to establish the facility in Germany.
While the demonstration plant would allow fast-tracking of the trial product, Talga expected future full-scale processing to be undertaken in Sweden.