Graphene Is Becoming an Ingredient, Not the Product

There have been many moments over the past decade when graphene appeared to have finally crossed the threshold from promising laboratory material to commercial reality. New consumer products appeared. Major industrial companies announced development programs. Producers built larger manufacturing facilities. Graphene-enhanced prototypes moved into testing, and occasionally into production. Each wave produced understandable optimism that graphene had finally “arrived.”

Another declaration that graphene is now becoming commercial should therefore be treated with some skepticism. There is no single point at which a material as versatile as graphene moves from research into commercialization, and the appearance of individual products has never meant that adoption across the broader market would automatically follow.

However, what has emerged over the past month or two looks somewhat different from many of the earlier commercialization waves. The change is showing up further downstream. Graphene is being formulated into additives, coatings, lubricants and other application-specific products designed around the way established industries already buy and use materials.

Graphene is beginning to disappear inside the product.

HydroGraph Clean Power offers a good example. Its Fractal Graphene Paste is a pre-dispersed aqueous concentrate containing 20% graphene by weight. The more important point is what the format removes from the customer's workload. Manufacturers can incorporate the paste into water-based formulations using conventional mixing equipment, avoiding dry-powder handling, high-energy dispersion equipment and some of the formulation work normally associated with adding graphene. HydroGraph says more than 30 customers have received samples for evaluation.

That changes the commercial proposition considerably. The customer is no longer simply being offered a high-performance nanomaterial. The material arrives in a form intended to fit much more easily into an existing process. This addresses one of the persistent obstacles to advanced-material adoption.

Exceptional laboratory properties have limited commercial value when the customer must first develop expertise in particle handling, dispersion, formulation and process optimization before reproducing those properties in a manufactured product.

For much of graphene's development, that burden often fell heavily on the end user. The proposition was effectively: Here is graphene. It has exceptional properties. Let us work together to determine how you might use it.

That approach was unavoidable in the early years. Producers needed application partners, while end users needed to learn what different graphene materials could and could not do. Both sides had to work through loading levels, dispersion methods, formulations and processing conditions.

The model produced real successes, but it also meant that many potential customers were being asked to take on part of the material-development process themselves.

From material development to application development

The graphene-enhanced electroless nickel additive commercialized by Graphene Leaders Canada shows how far downstream that model can go.

The company has focused on bath stability, process compatibility, manufacturability and integration across multiple electroless nickel chemistries. The objective is improved corrosion and wear performance within coating processes that already exist.

That leaves the plating company with a more conventional purchasing decision. Rather than buying graphene and then determining how to make it function in an electroless nickel bath, the customer evaluates an additive developed for that chemistry and decides whether the resulting coating delivers sufficient value in equipment life, maintenance costs or operating performance.

This is how mature specialty-material markets generally work. Suppliers do much of the formulation and application development upstream so that customers can evaluate performance without first becoming experts in the underlying material.

Sparc Technologies has taken a similar route with protective coatings. The company has been evaluating HydroGraph's fractal graphene for its ecosparc protective-coating additives, using a screening process in which only around 3–5% of graphene grades meet its requirements for corrosion performance, consistency and stability in liquid media. HydroGraph's FGA-1 was incorporated at low loading into a commercial water-based acrylic epoxy coating through ecosparc as a stable, ready-to-use additive.

That screening step is commercially important. A coatings manufacturer does not necessarily want to evaluate dozens of graphene grades to determine which one has the correct morphology, chemistry, dispersibility and consistency. Sparc performs much of that work before the material reaches the end user. The graphene remains essential, but much of the graphene expertise moves upstream.

Why this phase looks different

Earlier commercialization milestones tended to center on production scale, successful demonstrations and partnerships with major industrial companies. A producer showed that graphene could be manufactured in kilograms or tonnes rather than laboratory quantities. A prototype demonstrated improved performance. A graphene company announced a development relationship with a recognizable industrial name.

Those milestones mattered. They demonstrated that the material could be produced, that it could improve real products and that established manufacturers were willing to investigate it. But they did not always answer the harder commercial question: Can someone sell me a graphene-containing product that works reliably, economically and without forcing me to change everything else I already do?

Recent developments are beginning to address that question more directly.

Graphene Manufacturing Group's THERMAL-XR is a useful case. In July, GMG reported that THERMAL-XR had passed 30,000 hours of corrosion testing without signs of corrosion. The company also reported more than AU$400,000 in June orders, had commissioned a dedicated blending plant capable of producing hundreds of thousands of liters annually and was expanding its distributor network.

The commercial questions surrounding the product have therefore moved well beyond whether graphene can improve a coating.

Can the formulation be produced consistently? Will it survive prolonged qualification? Can manufacturing capacity support larger orders? Will customers reorder? Can the product reach users through normal sales channels? These are ordinary industrial-product questions, which is precisely why they matter.

The next step came when GMG entered an agreement with Blackwoods to distribute G® LUBRICANT and THERMAL-XR across Australia. Blackwoods already serves industrial, mining, manufacturing and construction customers through branches, distribution centers and online channels.

The agreement puts graphene-enabled products into the same commercial infrastructure through which customers already purchase other industrial and maintenance materials.

A distribution agreement may attract less attention than a record-setting laboratory result or a dramatic prototype, but it answers a question that advanced-material companies eventually have to face: how does the product get bought when the customer is no longer part of a development program?

A mature market cannot depend indefinitely on graphene producers identifying each customer, explaining the material, arranging samples and guiding every application project. At some point, products have to become accessible through ordinary channels.

A maintenance manager should be able to buy a graphene-enhanced lubricant because it reduces friction or improves operating efficiency. An HVAC operator should evaluate a coating based on heat transfer, corrosion protection or energy savings. A concrete producer will care about strength, durability, cement reduction and lifecycle economics.

The graphene itself becomes part of the explanation for performance, rather than the principal reason for the purchase.

The customer buys the application

First Graphene's recent activity in construction follows the same logic. PureGRAPH4 CEM is an application-specific product for cement and concrete rather than a generic graphene powder aimed at the construction industry.

In August, First Graphene reported an agreement with Sixth Element Material Technology concerning distribution of PureGRAPH4 CEM in China, targeting future sales into the Chinese cement and concrete sector.

The product name itself is revealing. PureGRAPH CEM identifies the application before the customer has to ask what the graphene might be used for.

The producer is attempting to deliver something designed around an existing industrial process and then build the distribution relationships needed to place that product into a very large market.

There is still plenty of development work in this model. Application-specific products need qualification, customers need convincing and commercial forecasts do not always translate into revenue. Much of the graphene industry still sells materials rather than fully formulated solutions, and many end users continue to participate in lengthy development programs.

The point is not that the earlier model has disappeared. It is that the downstream model is appearing often enough to look less exceptional.

Even some recent collaborations that resemble the partnerships of previous commercialization periods are becoming more tightly tied to defined applications. GMG's agreement with Alstom, for example, concerns the testing and development of graphene products specifically for rail HVAC systems.

An MOU remains an early-stage commercial signal and should not be confused with revenue. But the development target is narrow and identifiable. The work concerns particular products in a particular operating environment, rather than a broad search for places where graphene might perform well.

Commercialization by removing friction

A common thread runs through many of these recent announcements: they remove practical obstacles between graphene and the customer.

Pre-dispersed pastes reduce powder handling and dispersion work. Application developers screen graphene grades before they reach the end user. Formulated additives reduce the need to redesign existing chemistries. Qualification data removes uncertainty. Conventional distributors make graphene-enabled products easier to purchase.

None of these developments has the drama of discovering a new graphene property. But that may be exactly the point.

Earlier stages of the industry were necessarily focused on expanding capability—making more graphene, improving material quality, demonstrating unusual properties and exploring a very broad range of applications.

Commercial adoption depends on something less glamorous: making the material easier to use. A manufacturer faced with adopting a new material already has enough risk. New suppliers, uncertain specifications, unfamiliar processing behavior, qualification costs and internal approval procedures all make adoption difficult. Every technical problem that can be solved before the material reaches the customer's production line improves the chances that graphene will be used at all.

This helps explain why the current phase should not be treated simply as another round of announcements that graphene has finally commercialized.

Mass adoption is not assured. Many applications will still face long qualification periods, entrenched incumbent materials, difficult economics and technical problems specific to their markets.

But parts of the industry appear to be working on a different class of problem now.

The question is less often whether graphene can produce a useful performance improvement. In some applications, that has already been demonstrated many times.

The harder question is whether that performance can be packaged into something repeatable, manufacturable, easy to buy and straightforward enough to adopt.

Success may make graphene less visible

There is a paradox in this development: If graphene becomes more successful as an industrial material, the word "graphene" may matter less in the purchasing decision.

A company buying a corrosion additive will ultimately care about corrosion resistance and service life. A manufacturer evaluating a polymer formulation will look at mechanical, electrical or thermal performance. A building operator will care about lower HVAC energy consumption. A concrete producer will focus on strength, durability, cost and emissions reduction.

The enabling material can be critically important without being the reason the customer buys the finished product. That is already true across mature specialty-material markets. Customers routinely purchase formulations containing additives they know little about because suppliers have converted material science into usable performance.

Graphene tonnage may therefore become a less complete measure of commercialization as this model expands. Because graphene can be effective at relatively low loading levels, modest quantities of the material can influence much larger volumes of coatings, polymers, lubricants, cementitious materials and other finished products.

A more useful measure may eventually be the scale of the downstream products and processes in which graphene plays an enabling role.

Earlier commercialization milestones proved that graphene could be produced, that it could improve products and that serious industrial companies were willing to investigate it.

The recent stories suggest that another part of the process is gaining momentum.

Graphene is being formulated, screened, qualified and packaged around specific applications. Some of those products are beginning to move through conventional distribution networks. The customer is being asked to undertake less graphene development and make a more familiar commercial decision. That may be one of the clearest signs yet that parts of the graphene industry are maturing.

The industry is not finished selling graphene. The customer, however, wants what graphene can do.