VANCOUVER, August 2019: In a major breakthrough for graphite production in Sri Lanka, Ceylon Graphite Corporation, which has its headquarters in Vancouver in Canada, announced it had received a mining license for its K1 graphite project in the island nation, the final milestone before commercial production.
Sri Lanka’s mining regulator, the Geological Survey and Mines Bureau (GSMB), granted the industrial mining license ‘Category A’ to Ceylon Graphite’s wholly owned subsidiary Sarcon Development (Pvt) Ltd. The license is the highest category license in Sri Lanka and grants the company exclusive rights to mine, process and trade in graphite mined within the project area. It also allows for underground multi-borehole blasting, commercial production, use of all mining machinery and equipment and export of graphite.
“This is a huge development for Ceylon Graphite and is what we have all been working towards for the last two and a half years,” said Bharat Parashar, Ceylon Graphite’s Chairman and CEO. “Historically the GSMB has granted just four IMLA licenses for graphite mining in Sri Lanka including the Sarcon/Ceylon Graphite license,” Parashar said in a statement.
“We have achieved this license in a short period of time thanks to the hard work of all our Sri Lankan colleagues. I must also thank the GSMB for their assistance and guidance.”
K1 is in Karasnagla, Sri Lanka and the authorities had earlier granted Ceylon Graphite its environmental permit for K1 last week. In addition to starting commercial production, the company aims to expand the exploration work to at least three new sites and develop a processing capability in Sri Lanka.
Ceylon Graphite Corp holds exploration rights over a land package of around 121km² in Sri Lanka. These rights cover areas of historic graphite production from the early 20th century and represent a majority of the known graphite occurrences in Sri Lanka from its glory days as the world’s prime producer of graphite. Graphite mined from Sri Lanka is known to be some of the purest in the world but accounts for less than 1% of global production. Currently, China is the world’s largest graphite producer, followed by Brazil, Canada, India and Ukraine.
As a non-metal, Graphite is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity and also has the highest strength of any natural material. It has a wide range of industrial uses including being used in steel-making, brake-pads and dry lubricants. It is also used in fuel cells, which power hybrid and electric vehicles and in lithium-ion batteries used in portable consumer devices, like laptops and smartphones. Lots of graphite are also used in gun barrels.
However, it wasn’t until recently that graphite began to gain popularity. Interest in graphite mining is increasing in large part because lithium-ion batteries are becoming more and more common. These batteries are used in everything from phones to electric vehicles, and graphite is one of their key raw materials. As the use of lithium-ion batteries continues to increase, graphite demand is expected to rise at least in the next few years. Many experts think graphite will remain a key raw material in electric vehicles’ batteries for at least the next decade.
“Sri Lanka has the purest graphite on earth,” CEO Bharat Parashar told Proactive Investors, a leading international multi-media news organisation. “Unlike other places, which have flake and amorphous graphite, Sri Lanka has vein graphite. Vein graphite is like the veins in your body — its continuous flow, like a mini stream underground coming up from the core of the earth to the surface.”
Why this is so important is due to the incoming electric vehicle and energy storage revolution – or decarbonisation – that is rapidly approaching.
Batteries will fuel electric vehicles and help smooth the undulations that the weather can mean for renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.
“Decarbonization is taking place in a big way across the entire globe,” says Parashar. “Decarbonization is taking place not only in the electric vehicle space but also in energy storage in all forms of our daily life. We see graphite as the new oil.”
Ceylon Graphite’s deposits are veins, so rather like gold mining, once you hit the vein it just a question of following it, says Parashar.
Parashar says that when he started to look at the possibility for a graphite mining operation in Sri Lanka he was stunned by the country’s previous production history.
Previous miners stopped, however, when they hit bedrock, but with modern techniques that is not a problem anymore.
“We tried to acquire all the pre-production sites we could,” he said, referring to how Ceylon Graphite ended up with 121 licences. Parashar sees the company having tens of mines in operation with each costing about US$1 million to bring into production. All are underground as open pit mining is not allowed in Sri Lanka, which also means agreement has to be reached with the surface landowner for work to start.
