Tirupati Graphite plc (LON:TGR, OTCQX:TGRHF), the specialist graphite and graphene company developing sustainable new age materials, has announced a technological milestone which will significantly improve performance of the Company’s primary graphite and downstream specialty graphite production processes.
In July 2021, the Tirupati Graphene & Mintech Research Centre (“TGMRC”) established a pilot scale version of its unique Column Flotation System (“CFS”) which it developed for use across the Company’s primary and downstream specialty graphite production plants.
After concluding successful trials, Tirupati will be shipping the first commercial scale CFS with a 1.5 MT per hour capacity, for installation and operation at its 9,000 tpa Vatomina graphite production plant in Madagascar.
The CFS developed by the Company has demonstrated a number of advantages over conventional flotation cell technologies commonly used in graphite processing including the ability to:
o reduce power consumption during the flotation stage of the process by c.40%;
o eliminate corrosion and wear in flotation thereby reducing maintenance, costs and production downtimes; and
o reduce the number of processing/floatation stages required to achieve desired graphite purity levels thereby lowering overall costs of production.
The Company will be incorporating the new CFS in its upcoming capacity expansion projects replacing three out of four flotation stages. This can be achieved without changing the planned timelines and is expected to deliver significant commercial and operational improvements, further strengthening the Company’s status as a lowest cost quartile producer of natural flake graphite. Significant benefits on cost and efficiency are expected in the upcoming 18,000 tpa Sahamamy expansion due to complete at the end of Q2 2022 and in the follow on 54,000 tpa of additional capacity planned to be built in Madagascar by 2024. The Company will update the markets further in due course.
Shishir Poddar, Executive Chairman of Tirupati Graphite, said:
“Global flake graphite demand continues to grow driven by the acceleration in the transition to electric mobility and growth in other flake graphite consumption arenas such as flame retardant and thermal management applications. As such, we are increasingly confident in our strategy of rapidly increasing our production capacity.
“Our dedicated research centre in India which is the technological backbone supporting the Group’s operations, has enabled us to commercialise our Column Flotation System with many unique features allowing us to further reduce our costs and increase efficiencies at our primary flake graphite operations in Madagascar, downstream specialty graphite operations in India and, in due course, our primary flake graphite projects in Mozambique as well.
“We believe in continued innovation and technological improvements and continue to make progress towards being an important contributor to the energy transition economy and in the process seize the opportunities for creating sustainable values for our shareholders.”
