Ann: Balama Update, page-44

That was my point, even if regulators do close their eyes on the subject, end users due to increased awareness of consumers would prefer indeed to ensure and even require greener processes from their supply chain providers, more so if you are going to build a plant in a developed country such as the US (even more scrutiny and awareness), it is difficult to track the source of graphite in asian markets, not so in europe or the US.

Of course the elephant in the room is that thermal purification is much more expensive than chemical purfication, the question is how much more ? an approximative figure may be loosely derived from the differential in price between synthetic graphite and natural spherical graphite. the main cost differenntial is the expensive thermal purification process of petroleum coke to get it up to 99.99% purity. That is why synthetic graphite cots double the price of spherical natural graphite for battery anodes (8000$ per tonne VS 16.000$ per tonne). So we may loosely extrapolate and say that thermal puritifcation may cost at least double the cost of chemical purification. If chemical purification costs 2000$ per tonne, using thermal purification may cost at least 4000$ per tonne, which means less margins for those going this "greener" way, and I suspect that is why Syrah is insisting (wrongly IMO / short term thinking) on chemical purification.

Natural graphite is by definition greener than synthetic graphite (just graphite mining VS oil mining + processing to get a residue product such as petrouleum coke + much more processing to "clean the dirty" petroleum coke up to battery anodes graphite standards (probably they are starting at 80% - 88% carbon purity petroleum coke VS 95%+ carbon purity for natural graphite)

Besides performance differentials in batteries depending on application (hotly debated topic, in some metrics natural graphite performs better but in other metrics synthetic graphite is still king) if I am an end user and I have to choose between synthetic graphite and spherical natural graphite, I would think twice before selecting natural graphite if it is done through the chemical purification process, it loses a substantial chunk of its "greener" argument....in other words, price is not everything....