 So we hear the ID Tech Act show here with the Abalonics and so who are you? I'm Rune Wendelboe I founded Abalonics 14 years ago and with the idea to make tough coatings and after a few years we came across graphene oxide which we could make in only a few grams batches over the years after some requests to deliver larger batches we developed a safe process safe and scalable process so we now make one kilogram one gram was enough to work for one year making thin films so the challenge now is that there aren't many people who really need those quantities so we have over capacity but we work closely with now a list of six professional customers who industrial customers who who seem to be at either production or pilot level in there this is a graphene what is this this is this is actually a free stride graphene oxide which is one of the derivative products we have so this is just 0.5 grams filling a container of 50 milliliters you said 0.5 grams yeah 500 milligrams so that means this stuff is very very very light it's the same quantity as in this one which is a more dense powder so how do you make it undense how do you make it what's called expand oh well it's just free stride so that's a very normal like freeze-dried coffee and so what do you say from graphite to battery yeah so yeah about the graphene batteries he already been through a graphene oxide right not yet everything but I was just checking here and you say from graphite to battery what do you talk about here so it's basically related to what one has been doing in a balonics basically when I get his raw material graphite from Norwegian sources and converts him to reduce graphene oxide which we utilize in some battery applications specific battery application called liquid sulfur battery people call it next generation the battery technology after lithium ion batteries and then we try to find the final application final end users liquid oxide no this is lithium lithium lithium sulfur yeah sulfur is gonna be the big successor yeah next generation yeah successor to lithium ion batteries there are two candidates to my little sulfur or little mayor batteries little mayor is considered like 230 40 years maybe some some as some claims it will never become commercialized so lithium sulfur is considered the next generation because of his high energy density because of its abundance and environmentally friendly materials using environmental friendly materials like sulfur because it's abundant it's cheap it's everywhere it's by product of the chemical industry and the interesting thing here is that we combine these two companies these are sister companies Rune makes reduced graphene oxide we try to utilize in our batteries which finds a specific application in lithium sulfur batteries unlike using this material as the electrode active material we are using it as a very small amount of additive in battery formulation electrode formulation so what does the graphite do with the lithium sulfur what is the connection there is no graphite there is reduced graphene oxide so basically in order to make reduced graphene oxide you have to start with graphite there's a natural source of graphite in Norway graphite coal mine and you basically get graphite through modified humerus method you exfoliate graph graphene layers and oxidize it and then reduce it to form reduced graphene oxide so we are not directly using graphite in the battery but we are using a converted graphene oxide and that part it goes inside the lithium sulfur lithium sulfur but lithium sulfur doesn't mention anything about graphene yeah it doesn't but if you go to the literature you will see that people are utilizing different polar compounds to solve some intrinsic problem of sulfur electrode and reduce graphene oxide is one of them is that the best way to do it to what it is it is cheap it is easy to tune graphene oxide you know when I say chip it might a little be misleading because we have full access to reduce graphene oxide from a ballonics which is the sister company however it's very easy to tune the surface properties so surface chemistry of graphene oxide so you can just tune it to specific problem to solve specific problems in the battery what does it say here on this one oh that is again a ballonics yeah that is again a ballonics very scientific detail that I cannot explain what's going on here yeah so since there weren't any real need for large quantities what we did we we took our graphene oxide and developed a range of derivative products like deacidified geo graphene oxide is very very acidic so for many application you may need this acidity may be a problem and we see customers now buying different products and actually the increase in sales over the last few years has not been in the basic graphene oxide but in all these derivatives products and the first real industrial application we see is also in one of the derivatives which one and that's I I don't cannot say which one because it's yeah but it's I can say who it is it's a company in Sweden that does I'm joking no actually they talked to IKEA and many other also because it's for anti-corrosion and replacing chromium and things but this one is on the plate or make a anti corrosion plate plating on parts for scania tracks so the company is called Provexion is in Gothenburg and they now do this from 1st of January so you need to put it on all the train tracks that's a lot of that's a lot of exactly that's big yeah so they dip in this suspension and they do some treatment and they add other component that's the one way you can use all your material right yeah and all the train tracks on all of them well a train tracks is not it could it could be and the heat exchangers for example is what on the list they were and and bolts because there is often a lot of corrosion on bolts so corrosion is no good a corrosion represent a loss of 2% of world economy per year well and if you can reduce reduce that to 1% it's 1% of the total world economy which is a lot of money that's a good idea that sounds like great what are you showing here and on this wall here well can you say this yeah this is actually a nitrogen-doped geo which has some advantages in the sulfur batteries we talked Tesla talked about before it holds sulfur in place more efficiently than pure graphene oxide it holds the sulfur in place so is it related to the batteries it's related to the batteries the problem with sulfur batteries is that sulfur migrates from migrates from the cathode to the anode and the graphene oxide can be used to hold it in place in the cathode and it says ultra sonication yeah we mean it means we have to disperse it in water so we have it in ultra sonification bath for half an hour this is very standard it's not something we invented it's very general practice in Norway one of the best mines or what yeah the biggest source Norway's very expensive country so this mine can operate because they have one of the highest grade graphite fights in the world it's 70% pure graphite in what they dig out whereas other mines in Africa and other places China have as low as 1% so as graphene is it going to be huge in the future or is it already huge or a lot of people are talking about graphene right yeah there's a high isn't going to be and there's a lot of fake news so many people claim things that are not true or they wish would be true I think this will go ahead there will be a development where we first see some uses in high-end products like sports equipment and sensors and things where the kilo gram price could a kilo gram price of one thousand dollars or more is not a problem and then we once we scale up we can lower the price we have estimated that when we come to real industrial scale production we can come down to 25 dollars per kilo a kilo production cost and then that opens up a lot of new application like what like in smart clothes yeah everywhere and for example concrete there's a lot about talking about concrete I think much of it is fake news but they could be also real advantages like does it improve the concrete yeah the strength and the corrosion like stopping micro cracks from forming so that salt comes into the concrete and corrodes it so that means you're gonna solve potholes it's not gonna be potholes anymore because the concrete is gonna be stronger yeah hopefully I'm not doing that myself but there are many claims in the literature so once we come down to low prices these applications can be mass massive volumes so here you are with a scallant graphic partner company right and you have other people around here to boost doing different things or talking about different things or yeah I mean we the applications we know sees this corrosion protection and also some protection of PCBs and we have a customer who develops membranes for fuel cells our actually our biggest customer in a actually in a country in East Europe and we have people working with water treatment the graphene oxide has some properties that are very different from other materials and very high surface area so and it's easy to work with compared to many other non-materials so it definitely has advantages and that we think will materialize over years in real real industrial applications but it will take years are you the leader in Norway for this kind of stuff yeah I would say yes yes and no is a leader for this kind of stuff in the world no because of the graphite mines no there are many others from China much lots of graphite mines so we don't depend we think we the scallant graphite now develops a new pure graphite powder which we will use in our production until now they have just sold unrefined graphite to Germany and that contains too much silicates for our application so but we see it as a very high quality graphite so there is there is room for improvement in all levels here is this R&D that needs to be invested in certain fields or yeah partners doing everything or you have to do it even if this anti-corrosion coating now is good there's no chance it's the best we could achieve so we will work with this customer to constantly improve and tune the properties of our graphene oxide and they will tune and improve the the all the other ingredients so to improve further it will never stop