Last February, when Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) announced its Gigafactory, it spawned a tremendous marketing campaign among graphite junior mining companies. They’ve claimed – and rightly so – that this has tremendous implications for graphite consumption. In fact this single factory (and there are certainly other Li-battery production facilities on the way) can have a tremendous impact on global demand for flake graphite. Consider that Tesla plans on producing 500,000 EVs/year by 2020 with 54 kg. of graphite per vehicle (the 2013 Model S, estimate by Gareth Hatch). This requires 27,000 tonnes of coated spherical graphite (aka “SPG”). The amount of graphite per vehicle could be as much as 50% higher today. However, this figure is after a tremendous amount of graphite is lost in the spheronization process – certainly more than half and up to two-thirds, meaning that Tesla’s graphite demand could be well over 50,000 tpa. and as high as 80,000 tpa. We compare this with a flake graphite market that’s currently <400,000 tpa. and a spherical graphite market that’s currently ~100,000 tpa…..
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3297795-tesla-has-a-graphite-problem
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