MRL Corporation: World Gets It !!!, page-27

Finally, MRL Corporation has entered the final phase of construction at its Sri Lankan graphite project, putting it on track to be in production early next year.

http://www.miningnews.net/markets/investment/mining-briefs-azure-gr-and-more/


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Meanwhile, MRL Corporation will raise $4 million through a placement to fund the start of production at its graphite projects in Sri Lanka.

The company will issue shares at 5.5c each, with an attaching option for every two shares issued as it moves towards production at the end of the year.

The placement will take place across two tranches, with the second requiring shareholder approval at the company’s annual general meeting.

http://www.miningnews.net/markets/capital-raisings/capital-watch-magnis-mrl-and-more/


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Elsewhere, MRL Corporation rose 11% to 5.9c after signing a heads of agreement with Imagine Intelligent Materials.

The agreement will help identify commercial applications for MRL’s graphite and graphene.

http://www.miningnews.net/markets/market-wrap/weak-session-for-miners-2/


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MRL Corporation shares were up 26.3% to 7.2c after testing on ore from its Sri Lankan graphite revealed graphene yield in excess of 90% from the exfoliated portion of graphite, and 43.6% for total graphite.

http://www.miningnews.net/markets/market-wrap/materials-up-but-market-falls/


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Finally, MRL Corporation has appointed Imagine Intelligent Materials as an agent for high grade graphite and graphene products from its Sri Lankan projects.

Imagine will characterize and certify MRL’s products with the objective of selling them into the optimum graphene applications, and will negotiate sales on the company’s behalf.

MRL will pay Imagine a commission on sales of products which carry the Imagine certification mark.

http://www.miningnews.net/markets/investment/mining-briefs-bc-iron-carpentaria-and-more/


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“On the one hand, no one wants higher interest rates because that causes the equities to fall and the US dollar to go higher, but on the other hand, the bear sentiment that is dominating now promotes fear that the growth isn’t there because rates aren’t rising,” Far East Capital analyst Warwick Grigor said.

http://www.miningnews.net/markets/market-wrap/weak-leads-for-aussie-stocks/


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Far East Capital analyst Warwick Grigor said everyone was blaming China and the falling oil price for the Dow’s decline, but the actual answer was more obvious.

“The Dow cannot rise if interest rates go up. Investors have been dancing around the issue for many months and finally the reality has sunk in,” he said in a note to clients.

“The rising dollar and rising interest rates will rein in company profits. That is what the fall in the Dow is telling us as a new trading chapter opens.”

http://www.miningnews.net/markets/market-wrap/major-hit-for-global-markets-2/


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The graphene connection

http://www.miningnews.net/insight/outcrop/the-graphene-connection/

IT TURNS out that graphite and graphene may be two distinct stories. The Outcrop by Robin Bromby.

• 05 Feb 2015

Related Content

• Weighing up graphite’s future
• New resource boosts Talga
• Materials up but market falls
• Mining Briefs: Evolution, Triton and more
• Talga changes its tune

Graphene, the wonder material, began to seep into investor consciousness only about three years ago, leap-frogging the already emerging graphite story.

Since then graphite has gained a life of its own, the number of Australian and Canadian juniors multiplying before our eyes (and continuing to do so, however at a slower rate now that some of the air has gone out of the bubble).

In fact, this writer some months ago began to step back from the graphite story; after having been (journalistically) through the uranium frenzy of 2007, the phosphate excitement that followed a year later, and then the rare earths madness of 2011, it just seemed that graphite was following a similar path. That is, too many companies chasing a niche market.

After all, as reasonably recent figures show, global production is well under 2 million tonnes, with 850,000 tonnes of that coming out of China. By contrast, if you totalled up all the proposed new production, the market would flooded even with the expected boom in demand for graphite in lithium-ion batteries. (And if – no, that should be “when” – some scientist comes up with an economically viable alternative to the lithium-ion battery, that will have its own impact on graphite.)

But there is a bigger concern: that is, that many investors and commentators have linked in their minds the graphite and graphene stories.

The problem with that is two-fold: one, the volumes of graphene produced in coming years will have a very limited impact on graphite revenues and, two, the fact that few mining companies are managing to get into the downstream business.

Nor are the Chinese standing still. News lobbed this week that authorities in Heilongjiang Province have offered up new areas for exploration with the intent of lifting Chinese graphite output, this considering that miners in this province, in far northeast China, have to transport their ore about 2000km to the processing plants in Shandong. The miners in the north also have weather challenges. Temperatures in January can drop as low as -31C. The extreme cold weather can prevent graphite mining for up to six months a year.

All that said, there seems little doubt that graphene is a story that will continue to be an exciting one. Even this week we hear that Sir Kostya Novoselov (one of the two men from the University of Manchester who won a 2010 Nobel Prize for their 2004 discovery of how to extract graphene from graphite) has developed a new 2D designer material using graphene.

Warwick Grigor at Far East Capital has, also this week, issued a highly detailed guide to graphene that brings us up to date on this wonder material. For the few who have not followed the story, graphene is 100 times stronger than steel, is so thin – just one atom wide – it’s transparent, and is flexible and electrically conductive. It conducts electricity better than copper and one day may replace silicon in chips.

As Grigor adds, “a graphene sheet one square metre in size could support a 4kg cat but that sheet would weigh only as much as the cat’s whiskers”

It is one of the hardest materials in the world, harder than diamonds and 200 times stronger than steel. It has the largest volume to surface ratio of any material, has electrical current density one million times that of copper and is self-repairing.

The problem is, as Grigor explains, is that there is no road map for investors. Australian investors who restrict themselves to ASX-listed companies will have limited access to upside considering that the initial momentum is building overseas (with the Chinese and South Koreans heading the list of companies filing graphene patents).

The graphene market was worth an estimated $US10 million in 2012. Estimates for future value range from $200 million by 2018 and, by 2023m $1 billion. But then, in 2011, similar projections were made about rare earths, all of which have failed to eventuate. Graphene will be different because of its fast-evolving ranges of use, but other than that anything quantifying future volumes remains pure guesswork.

It therefore follows that it would folly to make any projections about graphite demand related to this material. Graphite obviously is a growing sector with its many industrial applications, including high-tech ones, but these will be the determinant of how well the graphite space does in coming years. Graphene is just one part of the graphite story, and should not be confused with graphite’s overall potential.

http://www.miningnews.net/insight/outcrop/the-graphene-connection/


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http://www.miningnews.net/exploration/drilling/bora-bora-jumps-on-sri-lankan-drilling/

(I expect news like this for MRL Corporation soon...)


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Weighing up graphite’s future

http://www.miningnews.net/commodity/specialty-minerals/weighing-up-graphites-future/

GRAPHITE is one of the lone hotspots in the exploration sector. A number of junior outfits have sprung up in recent years ready to take advantage of a supposed uptick in demand in the future, but what started off as a trickle of new market entrants has become a flood, which could potentially turn a future market deficit into a surplus. By Daniel Gleeson

• 09 Sep 2015

Tesla's Gigafactory under construction

While demand was likely to increase in line with growing lithium ion battery production from hybrid and electric car manufacturers and increased environmental scrutiny on Chinese producers was likely to dent global output on the other side, it seemed unlikely all of the mooted production would find a home, according to a recent report from industry publication Industrial Minerals.

“There exists a growing window of opportunity for new flake graphite supply to enter the market, but given the extent of new discoveries, slated new production by 2020 appears to be well in excess of this opening,” Paterson Securities resource analyst Jason Chesters and CSA Global’s principal consultant Andrew Scogings and manager of resources Bill Shaw said in the report.

The authors highlighted the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada in the US, which could produce 500,000 lithium-ion battery units annually by 2020 and in turn consume the equivalent of 120,000tpa of flake graphite.

There were also plans by the likes of LG, Samsung and Apple to invest in expanding battery capacity, while potential future demand for graphene, a value-added graphite-based product, was also worth consideration.

“While the [graphene] market is in its infancy and is unlikely to become a volume consumer of natural graphite, the value-added potential of the industry is considerable,” the authors said.

Still, should all of this graphite production come on stream as planned – a bit of a leap – an extra 1-1.5 million tonnes per annum of extra flake supply could enter the market by 2020, compared with the current 500,000-600,000tpa market.

“Accordingly, it seems likely that many projects will fail to reach production,” the report said.

As a result investors should tread carefully when backing a graphite play. Fortunately for those eyeing weighing up an investment, the authors had drawn up a crib sheet which could help the selection.

“A quantitative matrix of six key factors in ranking graphite plays in the current market includes: i) deposit size, contained graphite and enterprise value; ii) location (country risk) and logistics; iii) flake size distribution; iv) product purity; v) offtake agreements; and vi) timeframe to production,” they said.

Using said criteria the authors compared 21 companies with listings in Australia, Toronto and the UK, attributing a maximum score of 10 under each measure.

One of the more debated project factors under consideration was flake size distribution; an all-important factor considering the size dictated what industry producers could sell into.

“Two facts that generally seem to be agreed are; first, the larger the flake in a deposit, the higher the purity of the graphite; and second, the larger the flake size, the higher the price, all else being equal,” the authors said.

In this respect, companies such as Kibaran Resources (Epanko), Magnis Resources (Nachu) and Toronto-listed Northern Graphite (Bissett Creek) were marked out as top performers under this category. The authors also gave Talga Resources credit for looking beyond the obvious and attempting to build a graphite-to-graphene demonstration plant in Germany for its Vittangi project in Sweden.

Product purity and the lengths to which companies were willing to go to secure a viable end-use market were also flagged up.

“It should be noted that graphite companies are increasingly considering moving further downstream and performing further product beneficiation themselves in order to differentiate their businesses to potential customers and achieve a higher price for the final product,” the authors said.

It named Archer Resources (Campoona/Wilclo South), Canada’s Flinders Resources (Woxna), Syrah Resources (Balama) and Valence Industries (Uley) as companies carrying out such work. They might not have scored perfectly on the purity metric, but they were putting themselves in a position to succeed by spending money on such research.

Size was not necessarily all it was cracked up to be based on these results. Those biggest on paper, such as Triton’s Nicanda Hill asset in Mozambique, or Mason Graphite’s Lac Gueret project in Canada fell down on location (in Nicanda Hill’s case) or offtake agreements (in Mason’s case). In fact, the highest overall scorer – Valence, which scored 42 points out of 60 and recently started up operations at Uley – came second to last (joint) in the size stakes, going against the adage of bigger being better.

And considering the authors’ reservations on the small window of opportunity for graphite producers, the companies scoring top marks on production timeframe – Valence, StratMin Global Resources (Loharano) and Flinders (Woxna) – all commanded high overall rankings (first, sixth and second, respectively).

http://www.miningnews.net/commodity/specialty-minerals/weighing-up-graphites-future/


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In my opinion we all have allot to be happy about when we see what is out there versus MRL Corporation.





Kind Regards

DYOR !!!