As potential "wonder materials" go, graphene is preposterously exciting, but also extremely frustrating. As we have reported many times, the atom-thick carbon mesh is stronger, lighter and more conductive than almost any equivalent material. It is also fairly simple to make in small batches -- ripping off a piece of sticky tape from a block of graphite is one low-tech method.

However, actually making graphene sheets in bulk is surprisingly difficult, and there are no obvious answers despite huge efforts from researchers across the world -- including at the National Graphene Institute in Manchester, close to where the material was first discovered in 2004.

That doesn't stop researchers from announcing that they've cracked it however. Over the last few years declarations of the "first mass production method" for making sheets of reliable graphene have been made several times, including by researchers at MIT, Samsung, the University of Pennsylvania startupGraphene Frontiers, Trinity College Dublin and others. Several methods have also been patented, though the absence of graphene batteries in your phone indicates no one has turned their research into factory-scale graphene farms.

Now another method has been described by researchers at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The question is why is their method different from all the others? And what hope is there that graphene could really be made in sufficient quantities to revolutionise our lightbulbs, batteries, vehicles and space exploration to the extent that we have been promised?

The ORNL's team report in the journal Applied Materials and Interfaces that their method -- which relies on chemical vapour deposition -- can create two-inch-squared sheets of graphene, contained within polymer composites.

Chemical vapour deposition is a technique used in industrial semiconductor production, which involves exposing chemicals to conditions where thin films of the desired product are deposited. The details on ORNL's method can be read in full in the research paper, though you'll have to pay to see it.

Instead of pure graphene, the system layers the material between sheets of polymer so that it can be easily used in commercial products. Others are attempting to create this same type of graphene sheet -- but crucially, most rely on using small flakes of graphene dispersed over the polymer rather than sheets of the material. The result is that the graphene often gets stuck in the polymer itself, reducing the conductivity. By using larger sheets, the team led by ORNL's Ivan Vlassiouk created polymer-graphene sandwiches "with graphene loading that is 50 times less compared to current state-of-the-art samples".

If -- and it's still a big if -- the method can be shown to be reliable, cost-effective and scalable, researchers said they can foresee the material being used in the usual range of products (batteries, aerospace, self-cleaning coatings, displays and manufacturing). However the team admits more work needs to be done to demonstrate large scale methods for making the material.