Tirupati Graphite plc (LON:TGR) Executive Chairman and Managing Director Shishir Poddar caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss hitting production targets and what it’ll mean for the business, meeting demand, key drivers in global demand, a new column flotation system and the progress of the graphite & graphene research centre.

Q1: By the end of this quarter, Tirupati Graphite should be commissioning a new 18,000 tonne per annum primary flake graphite plant in your mines in Madagascar. Are you confident that everything’s on track to hit that timeline?

A1: Just a small correction, Giles, it’s actually at the end of the next quarter so by end of June. Having said that, we are perfectly in order to meet the target and in the interim, we have evolved the project in a lot of ways.

Q2: That’s more than doubles your graphite production to 30,000 tonnes per annum, what will that mean for the business?

A2: This makes us one of the very significant producers globally. I think there would be maximum of two more producers outside China who will have a capacity above this capacity that we are creating. So, we will become the second or third largest producer of graphite outside China, that’s quite significant, 30,000 tonnes of graphite is not a small quantity and that helps us to build further.

Q3: Now, by the end of 2024, you’ll have increased capacity to 84,000 tonnes, are you confident there’ll be enough demand to meet that expansion?

A3: For sure, yes. If you see the graphite market ecosystem, as it stands today, the total global demand actually increased last year because of the more than doubling of EV sales more or less, and overall, the total demand of graphite in our assessment exceeds about 1.3/1.4 million tonnes. Going forward, we see growth in not only the energy transition industry but also in industries like fire safety, thermal management, in all these applications, graphite does play a very key role.

So, we do expect the growth to continue, the momentum to continue substantially to 2024/2025 and further on. Also, putting all that together possibly by 2024, the global demand should be reaching something like 2 million tonnes plus, and we will be at 84,000 so it will be just about 5%, or a bit more, of the global demand. That’s not a very huge capacity and we intend to be one of the global leaders in this space so absolutely perfect planning.

Q4: What would you say is driving this growth in global demand?

A4: A few things. What is universally known is the energy transition or the electric vehicle revolution, the grid storage, these are for energy efficiency and reduction of emission in mobility. This is quite a huge aspect for the globe right now, you will see nations around the globe working on this aspect.

Having said this, what is lesser known are the applications of graphite in other arenas like thermal management, I spoke about a bit earlier. So, graphite is used in cooling of devices, almost all electronic devices including your PCs, your laptops, your cell phones, in fact, even televisions, they use graphite-based thermal management sheets and that demand is growing.

Apart from that, the other very key driver is the flame retardant and expandable graphite other applications so with a few fires that broke out in different parts of the world, the world is looking at improved fire safety, and graphite-based flame retardant products are gaining more and more around the globe. That’s also increasing at quite a good pace.

Additionally, we are now seeing evolution of new materials, graphene and conductive polymers and things like this, these all use graphite as one of their ingredients so there are multiple drivers of growth of demand of graphite.

Q5: You’ve recently announced that you’ve developed and are implementing a new column flotation system at your mines. What would the benefits be for your operations?

A5: It’s a major event so the basic thing is that a column flotation system doesn’t have any moving part, there is no attrition, there is no friction or varying out in the entire process.

Apart from this, technically, it actually gives us better quality of our product output, it reduces the number of stages that you may need to use in the process further, we have already optimised that, this will help us further optimize it.

Thirdly, it actually helps in improving capacities also so a column flotation system is a much smaller equipment, which can do a much bigger job. It consumes much lesser power, it gives us much more uptime for the plant because it’s maintenance requirements are lesser.

So, all put together, it reduces our emissions, it increases our plant availability and it gives us better quality product.

Q6: So, how are you able to develop this new system and why haven’t other operators done the same thing?

A6: The flotation systems are standard mineral processing technique, but they have evolved over time. As far as we are concerned, you would recall I have been in graphite for 30 years plus, we have a team that has considerable expertise in mineral processing technology and development of equipment. All this led us to looking at column flotation systems, which is not something that is not used elsewhere, it’s something which is a known technology, but there were challenges in implementing it for graphite, there were challenges in technological aspects for it.

Over the years, we worked on it and we have perfected the technology of the column flotation system for using our process. It’s been in a journey, in fact, it has got more age than Tirupati Graphite itself as a company. The development of the system has been going prior to 2017 when this company was incorporated.

Q7: I’m sure we’ll talk about the other divisions in the Tirupati Graphite portfolio next time as news comes out but briefly, is everything on track with the specialty graphite and graphene research centre?

A7: Yes, a lot is going on, on that side too. You can expect us to come out with some more updates and developments along these business units.

I can say we are percolating around the markets with the products that we already manufacture, we are working on graphene commercial applications in bulk so that we can take our graphene unit to a large scale in due course. We are working on the composites that we have developed, the aluminium graphene composites.

It’s been a very hectic time of activity for us all round and we are building plants also on the downstream so yes, we will keep you updated as we mature things and we love to share with you next.