Syrah Resources, which has been ramping-up production at its Balama flake graphite project in Mozambique since November 2017, officially inaugurated the project in April 2018 in the presence of several local and national government officials. The Balama project has the potential to be the largest graphite operation in the world, increasing to a possible 350,000 t/y of capacity.

Roskill comments that “Syrah Resources plans to eventually produce its own spherical graphite from Balama material but has not yet found a suitable location to build a spherical graphite processing plant (the original location in Louisiana, USA having been refused by local authorities earlier this year). In the mean time, the company plans to ship flake graphite to established spherical graphite producers in China.