Nixene Journal Volume 9 Issue 5 Article 28

As fascinating as the technical developments are, it is the commercial side which needs highlighting in this summary this month. More evidence is mounting to support James Baker’s claim that graphene has reached a turning point and has overcome the hype of its early teens. We are starting to see noticeable movements in the five-year share price trends of graphene companies. Companies that have antiviral or battery applications are beneficiaries of renewed attention. I’ll draw your attention to the graphene companies share price section of this issue. There is a new graphene company, Sparc Technologies, launched on the Australian stock exchange. It has a deal to commercialise patents developed by the University of Adelaide and has attracted significant investor interest. Another Australian company GMG reported its series C investment round of AUD3million was oversubscribed. The company plans to float on the stock exchange next year. A new company called Toraphene has appeared making an eponymous product that is a graphene biopolymer that makes biodegradable packaging. It launched as a crowdfunded initiative and has raised nearly GBP700K already, double its ask. We have contacted the company and asked for more technical information about its products. Integrated Graphene Ltd, (IG) announced the completion of a GBP3.1 million round of investment in the business, IG is a UK Scottish-based tech company that manufactures a graphene foam that they call Gii. The company is targeting medical diagnostics and supercapacitors markets. Estonian supercapacitor company Skeleton is continuing its unstoppable rise. It announced it has raised EUR41.3 million ($48.5 million) in Series D financing This brings its total capital raised to over EUR93 million ($109 million) Lots of activity around graphene enhanced lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. As far as we can tell, this seems to be creating improvements in the life of the battery by maintaining the integrity of the electrodes. Improvements in charging time are also claimed. Tellingly, there is no evidence that graphene is improving the energy density of batteries. The rush to electric vehicles is creating a market pull for better batteries that the technology does not seem to be able to match. For now, if you want to travel further in your battery powered car, then you have to add more batteries. We finally discovered which tool is being used for the at-line Raman spectroscopy quality control for the production of graphene powders. First graphene has acquired the QT-Sampler made by BWTEK Metrohm. This allows the company to measure flake aspect ratio and number of layers of the graphene powders they produce. The data is used for statistical process control which means they have a sophisticated approach to making and characterising a consistent product. Adrian Nixon, 1st December 2020

Two new graphene companies have appeared on the radar this month. They both use a similar process to make graphene from methane gas with hydrogen as a by-product. Looking at the patents of the companies they both use a microwave reactor to tear apart the carbon and hydrogen atoms in methane, the carbon atoms recombine as graphene and the hydrogen atoms recombine to form hydrogen gas. There the similarities pause because the two companies have very different approaches for how to market their developments. The first company is Levidian, they are a relaunch of Cambridge Nanosystems from the UK. Their business model is focussed on using waste methane gas from a customer’s process. They use the reactor to lock up the carbon in the methane as graphene and claim carbon capture credits. The graphene production is secondary to this marketing approach. Using disclosures by the company, I was able to create a mass balance for the Levidian method. It appears that the process captures carbon from methane with around 30% efficiency (p.34). Not bad, but still some further progress to make. The second company is California based Lyten who publicly disclosed their activity just a few weeks ago. They were formed in 2015 and have been operating in stealth mode. Their graphene is used to make the electrode for a lithium sulphur (LiS) battery that has three times the energy density of normal lithium-ion batteries (p.35). They have probably decided to come out of stealth mode to raise capital for the scaling up of their process. The company is currently talking with five original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the automobile industry. The weakness of LiS batteries has been their capacity fade with repeated charge / discharge cycles. Lyten say they have improved on previous LiS designs so they might have something of interest for manufacturers of electric vehicles. Levidian patented their process in 2014 and Lyten in 2015. Lyten references the Levidian patents in their applications. This is how we know the two processes are very similar. Things could get interesting if one or the other company makes a lot of money in the future. As Elon Musk observed “A patent is like buying a lottery ticket to a lawsuit”. Staying with graphene powder manufacture, we feature John van Leeuwen of Universal Matter in a special feature (p.7). He is leading the drive to scale up the flash graphene process developed by Prof James Tour at Rice University. Universal Matter is definitely a company to watch in the future. All these graphene manufacturing processes are bottom-up, self-assembling graphene atom by atom to create high quality powders. These processes are in their infancy at present. If they can be scaled, they could disrupt the graphene-from-graphite manufacturers in future as they promise controllable quality graphene. This potential market disruption is something we’ll explore in the future, in the meantime there is much more to explore in this issue… Adrian Nixon, 1st December 2021