Focus on the Next Age of Carbon
Focus on Graphite
I was in London last week to attend a major international conference on graphite and graphene. There's much to tell you on that subject, but let's stay specific to ESI for now. We've been following this graphite-graphene space via our interest in Focus Metals (FMS: TSX-V), which has been in the ESI portfolio since February.
Focus shares have ridden up and down with the broad market trends this year. The share price was well over a dollar through about May. Then Focus shares traded in the
.80-1.00 range over the summer. Then we had a fall swoon to the 60-cent range.
I share the frustration of many readers that the Focus share price is not much, much stronger and far, far higher. The current market psychology simply won't let anything break too far to the upside, no matter the merits -- and with Focus, the merits are many.
I visited the actual graphite deposit at Lac Knife, Quebec, in September, and gave you a write-up on it. As I indicated, the actual graphite material in the ground is astonishing, due to its superb quality.
Since September, I've been doing more research in the field of mineralogy and crystallography, as pertains to graphite, as well as the chemistry and physics of graphene.
First, I'll say that the Lac Knife graphite is among the BEST ore in the world -- courtesy of hundreds of millions of years of geologic process. I won't get overly detailed, but there appears to have been two, and maybe three, major metamorphic episodes that cooked this graphite -- deep and hot -- and in essence "refined" it to the phenomenal quality we see.
Why is that important? Well, this gets to my second big point. Focus CEO Gary Economo let the cat out of the bag in London. He publicly stated something that I was keeping quiet, for lack of "official" confirmation -- until now.
The Graphene Revolution
According to Gary Economo, Lac Knife graphite is uniquely suited to extract "natural" graphene. That is, there's ore, and then there's Lac Knife ore. All those metamorphic episodes, and the associated heating episodes and hydrothermal geochemistry, have given us a raw material that's valuable almost to the point of pricelessness. It's sure as heck is worth more than 60 cents per share!
Thus, Focus has teamed up with a world-class chemistry group led by one of the very best graphite chemists you'll ever find. And Focus has accomplished the mission of extracting graphene from its graphite. (As is the custom here in ESI, I won't get into naming names, out of respect for people’s privacy and personal security.)
Up till now, almost all of the graphene that's ever been produced -- and overall, it's just very small quantities -- has been via a process called chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Basically, you pass methane gas (CH4) through an electromagnetic field. That energy field strips off the hydrogen atoms. Then the carbon "deposits" on another surface, with the carbon atoms arranged hexagonally in a super-thin layer.
How thin? Well, think of graphene as kind of like a sheet of paper -- except MUCH thinner. I mean one or two or, at most, a very few atomic diameters. Yet the graphene is extensive in its 2-D form. It's very flat and very thin. In crystallographic terms, you'd say that there's extensive carbon arrayed along the x- and y-axes, with just one or two carbon atoms' thickness along the vertical, z-axis.
Also, due to the nature of carbon-carbon bonding, graphene is ultra strong. How strong? Well, if steel is strong, then graphene is 200 times stronger. Yes, 200 times. Maybe more.
So why not just use CVD to make large amounts of graphene? That's easier said than done. There's a certain randomness to how the carbon atoms deposit under CVD. They go where they want to go. It's such a problem that the people who currently manufacture graphene via CVD can only create such small amounts of the substance. Graphene is so exotic that the going price is over $400 per gram -- or $181,600 per pound!
But Focus has figured out how to extract graphene from its Lac Knife graphite. Believe me, that's quite a scientific coup! Not to mention, it's going to become a cash cow for Focus by early in 2012.
I spoke with the top chemist about how he has managed to extract the graphene from the graphite. The short version of the answer is that it's a monumental achievement. I won't even begin to try and explain the process -- and it's so proprietary that I won't give away even the tiniest hint of how to do it. Go get your own world-class chemist. But the bottom line in all of this is that extracting graphene is doable, especially from the Lac Knife ore.
Even better, the "natural" graphene from Lac Knife graphite retains far better electrical and conductivity properties than the graphene that comes from CVD. So now we're dealing with a super-thin, super-strong substance that has phenomenal electrical and electronic properties too.
In the near-term, the Focus plan is to extract graphene in small-batch amounts. The chemistry side of Focus will just take Lac Knife ore and run it at low volumes, essentially on a bench-scale system. The idea is to prove up the ore, the process and the product to potential buyers. At $400 per gram, you don't need to run large volumes.
Where does it go from here? As far as you can open your mind.
The Next Carbon Revolution
Will graphene replace silicon in computer chips? Yes, and it won't take too long. Graphene is thin, strong and electrically conductive. You can etch it. You can stack it and build whatever transistor you want to design.
It's not overstating the case to say that silicon is becoming obsolete. Somebody ought to tell the chip makers. OK, I'm just kidding -- sort of. The chip makers know this. Indeed, you'll eventually see graphene technology in common items like hand-held devices.
Can you add graphene to metal or plastic and make materials much stronger? I'm glad you asked, because you sure can. You can actually add graphene to molten metal and when it cools, the graphene crystals will align within the metallic crystal structure. It helps that graphene doesn't even begin to break down until over 3,000 degrees Celsius -- hotter than the melting point of almost any metal. So now you can have graphene-strengthened supermetals.
In fact, the head chemist for Focus showed me a piece of boring old polystyrene plastic that he re-extruded and impregnated just with nanotubes -- not even graphene. The stuff was nearly unbreakable. "This was just to prove up the extrusion process," he said. "Now imagine how strong that'll be when we add actual graphene."
Using graphene, we're talking about an entire new generation of supermaterials, with Star Trek qualities. To mix my metaphors, I'd say that Star Trek IS graphene! In one back-of-the envelope calculation, we figured that a graphene-strengthened piece of plastic or steel just a fraction of an inch thick could offer the same protection as 8 inches of armor plate.
What else? How about alternative energy applications? Imagine graphene coatings on windows that, in effect, create solar panels with efficiencies over twice what people are currently getting from the best panels. Think in terms of solar cells with 75% efficiency and more. Maybe we really will see solar-powered skyscrapers.