Graphene market

Editorial

Asia has been the largest market for graphene to date and this trend shows little sign of abating as the emphasis on commercialization by governments in the region appears to be paying dividends. New products, research breakthroughs and production enhancements are occurring on a monthly basis. South Korea has recently committed significant funds to the further development of graphene and most major Asian countries place great emphasis on commercializing graphene to meet future technology challenges, especially in energy and electronics. Although most products currently use graphene on a very basic level (mainly as a conductive or temperature regulating additive) the next wave of products could blow the competition away in other regions. Watch this space.

Graphene market pricing, production processes and confusion about what is actually being produced and sold

Because of the newness of two dimensional materials, it can be predicted that there will be both intense interest in processes to produce graphene, as well as profound confusion about what is actually being produced and sold. For example, peer reviewed articles in Nature suggest that the global production capacity is already in the range of hundreds to thousands of tons per year (Ren and Cheng, 2014). That may even be true for low grade material that is legitimately referred to as graphene, but from a physicist’s point of view is really thin layered graphite.
However, a literature search was unable to find any source of as much as 1 kilogram of monolayer graphene or few-layer graphene (FLG), the types that most closely resemble the theoretical model of graphene.

Article contents include:

Why the distinctions between different grades of graphene are important.
Prospects for new processes to make high quality graphene.
Selling prices for the different recognized variants of graphene. The price per unit mass of different materials referred to as graphene ranges over an amazing 9 orders of magnitude, for a billion dollars per kilogram equivalent of monolayer material (though of course the amount of this material is very small) to a few dollars per kilogram for exfoliated graphite.
Processes for producing large quantities of the highest grade materials, namely monolayer and/or few-layer graphene, at a modest cost.

Graphene Quantum Dots (GQDs)

The market for graphene quantum dots is a fascinating sub-set of the graphene industry, but will compete with quantum dots in end user markets. We provide an in-depth assessment of these materials, markets and producers.

Graphene investment and funding news