Tagla Resources (an Australian-based graphite, iron and gold miner with prospects in Western Australia and Sweden) and the University of Adelaide have been studying graphite ore from Tagla's wholly-owned Nunasvaara deposit in Sweden. Tagla says that the have made a breakthrough in single-step graphene recovery method. This will allow the company to produce both graphite and cheap graphene from this mine by using a single process.
According to Tagla, this process breakthrough would allow the company to use the unprocessed graphite ore and by-pass intermediate stages. Researchers at the University demonstrated that the quality of the produced graphene is comparable to graphene produced synthetically. This new process can be scaled up commercially.
The researchers explain that this deposit may have extraordinary physical properties enabling graphene extraction that are unique to that ore body. Now the company wants to upscale the testing and also develop trial batch plant and hopes that it will lead to trial production.