InvestorIntel Publisher Tracy Weslosky in an interview with Mark Thompson, Managing Director for Talga Resources Ltd. (ASX: TLG) on the competitive nature of Talga’s deposit, the overall graphite market and the rising demand for graphite in batteries and electric vehicles. They also discuss the graphene process advantage wherein, Talga is “able to process and produce graphene at essentially the same price as we produce graphite.”

Tracy Weslosky: Mark you’re about to tell our audience something that I think is just sensational, which is that you have the greatest graphite in the world. Is that correct?

Mark Thompson: Yeah, well, it’s recognized as the highest grade deposit of graphite in the world and compliant NI 43-101 or JORC. It’s very large. It’s open cut. It’s in a great jurisdiction in Sweden. Very importantly, it’s got a couple of strange characteristics about how we can process it.

Tracy Weslosky: I know that you have some intriguing ways to process it, but before we get there I want to slow you down for our audience still trying to understand this graphite market because they’re being hit with a lot of information. What makes your grade better and what does that mean?

Mark Thompson: The grade is essentially a high graphite grade. It means that you can process less tons to get one ton of product that you can sell. It’s cheaper the higher the grade is. Being at surface means it’s also cheaper as well. You have cost advantages to the purity of the graphite being very, very high at surface. Then when you’re close to things, like roads and railways and other metrics that can come into it, this gives you other advantages as well. That is a standard mining, sort of, advantage. Then we have another advantage in the type of ore that it is and the way it works.

Tracy Weslosky: Now my understanding, so I think everybody out there understands it’s not only competitive, but cost effective, is that you’re also competitive. Your grade is so high that you’re competitive with synthetic graphite. Can you tell me about that?

Mark Thompson: Yeah. We’re competitive with synthetic, which we’ve got an example of here. Synthetic is nearly 100% pure graphite. Our ore even though it’s only 25%, which is the highest in the world as a resource, it actually looks the same and the actual particles are the same except that our rock is just sitting on the ground and we can extract it at low cost and synthetic is something that’s extremely expensive to produce. Then we use that in order to process it in a special way.

Tracy Weslosky: In your presentation you do something that I have not seen any other graphite company in the world do and that’s with your testing. Can you tell me a little bit more about this?

Mark Thompson: Yeah. I guess one of the things about our ore is that people know that graphite goes into batteries and that it’s involved with conductivity. We have a little demonstration here with a battery that happens to be from a Tesla.