 Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Adrian Nixon of Investor Intel about the global graphene market. How are you today, Adrian? I'm very well, Tracy. How are you? I'm fantastic. And you know what? Graphene is so interesting, but of course many people out there don't actually know what graphene is. Do you mind if we just start with a basic question and can you tell our audience what is graphene? Yeah, sure. First of all, it's carbon. So it's the same stuff that's in pencils, graphite, or diamonds, or coal or soot. It's just the way it's arranged. So graphene tends to arrange itself in hexagonal sheets and it's what forms the graphite in graphite pencils. So lots of little sheets stacked up on top of one another. Graphene is one of these individual sheets that you can separate out and do fantastic things with. Of course. And speaking of fantastic things you can do stuff with, can you tell us why graphene is so important? Because that's what we want to talk about. I'll see. Yeah. Well, the first thing is it's 200 times stronger than steel, which is big enough as it is. And then you've got the fact, couple of this with the fact that it is the world's best electrical conductor. It also conducts heat better than any other material. It's also the world's thinnest material too. So it's incredibly strong, flexible, very thin, about a million times thinner than a human hair. So if you can imagine a sheet of this stuff would be one atom thick, so you barely see it shimmering. And you could put a two kilogram cat in the middle of this if you made a hammock of it. And it would just float there, supported almost by nothing. It's that strong and flexible. Great stuff. Lots of potential. Defense applications are just one of the applications for this wonder material. Yeah, you could make aircraft parts out of it. So you could make very light, very strong aircraft. You could also coat the surface of the ships, the hulls. And graphene is something called super hydrophobic. It reduces the drag of a ship by 35 percent. Just imagine what that does for fuel consumption. And how is it made that it's incredibly easy and incredibly hard at the same time. I've got this pencil, you know, it's graphite. So imagine lots of little layers of graphene all stuck together that make up graphite. So it's rather like the individual pages of this report, which we might come to in a bit. And so when you're drawing a pencil line on the surface of paper, you can drag it along the line and then gradually just release the pressure slowly, slowly, slowly. And what's happening is individual pieces of graphene are shearing off the graphite and somewhere along that faint part of the line, you've actually got a piece of graphene. So it demonstrates about this really easy to make. The problem is, well, what do you do with it? That's the hard bit. How do you get useful quantities of this stuff? Getting the usable quantities of graphene then is quite a challenge. There are two methods of making it because the top down method and the bottom up. And the top down method starts with graphite. You either smash it to pieces in a blender with various solvents and you can get lots of platelets in solution, which you can then dry as a powder. Or you can use electrochemical techniques to get the powder, graphene powder straight out in one go. Another way of making it is the bottom up way, which is actually assembling it atom by atom on a metal surface. It sounds complicated, but basically you get hot methane and very hot hydrogen at low pressures and copper surface. Don't try this stuff at home. And then gradually a layer of graphene will build upon the surface. And once the surface is covered, it stops growing. So you end up with a single atomic layer and that's roughly how the two methods work. And of course, the race is on to produce graphene and the numerous technologies. And your report, for instance, you know, I assume there would be a lot more companies. Approximately how many companies worldwide are producing graphene right now, Adrienne? There are about 63 companies worldwide making graphene and different claims for it. About 70 percent of them are using the top down approach, about 30 percent are making it by the bottom up approach. And they're based mainly in America, China. Europe has a good showing as well, as does Canada. And the UK, obviously, where graphene was first discovered, has a strong showing too. So lots of people are in a race to try and make this stuff around the world at the minute. And of course, there's a lot of people in the race to try and make graphene. Can you tell me what the state of the art manufacturing techniques are currently? What processes are leading? Very good point. State of the art, really, in terms of the quantity is firmly on the top down side. So there are a lot of people around the world making by the top down method. And it's fairly easy to do in chemical terms, but the the quality side of things to actually get a large surface area sheets of graphene. And when I say large, I'm talking about the area of maybe a postage stamp, something like that. They're usually on the metal side. So this is the bottom up approach depositing on copper or silicon carbide. And there aren't very many people successfully making the minute. The trick is everybody's after something which is manufactured on the scale of a carpet, let's say. And everybody assumes when people announce they're making graphene that they're reeling this stuff off in great roles. Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually getting proper true graphene made on a large scale is a very difficult challenge. And not many people have cracked it yet. I would guess Manchester in the UK is probably in the lead at the moment based on the research I've done so far. But there's lots of people chasing one another around the world. Well, speaking about around the world is the top global graphene expert. Adrian, I want to thank you for joining us today. And we're going to be speaking with you regularly. Thank you. My pleasure. Take care.