it's a very very flavor of the month uh mineral but uh flavor of the month and uses are widespread so it's very difficult to get your head around it's found in in nature in in three forms amorphous car amorphous graphite flake graphite and and lump graphite and generally the the carbon content of those three three raw materials is different and so you have to match the the raw material you've got with the eventual use you need so but the important things are that the desirable properties of graphite desirable properties are its high melting point the fact that it's an excellent conductor of heat and electricity and has the highest natural strength and stiffness of any material it can be it is non-toxic and it has a high resistance to corrosion and we're going to look at a couple of uses oh well it occurs and it occurs all over the place as well there's no dots on the map in australia but uh the asx is littered with companies with graphite projects in australia and in africa um i'm sure there's more projects in africa than on this on on this map which are the producers of graphite in 2012 there's a lot of projects in the pipeline so the key to graphite is finding a market with specific for a specific product it's traded in tons as concentrated powder the um large high purity flake graphite is used in the battery industry and there's it's in demand for lithium ion and vanadium batteries which are driving most of the demand for the for graphite but we're also i should have mentioned i guess that it's also used as uh in electrodes in a large number of applications and used for producing uh crucibles in for refractory material and foundry linings etcetera so wide a wide lot of wide variety of uses but it also is becoming increasingly important in in telecommunications and in smartphones this graph material called graphene which is a single layer of carbon atoms in with hexagonal joining is very strong very flexible and has a wide variety of uses in in the electronics industry the prices then vary dramatically depending on the end use and so trying to uh trying to match your graphite to the to our use in a project is extraordinarily demanding so if you're looking at a graphite exploration project you should be seeing whether the people have got an idea of how they're going to market specifically how they're going to market not just it's a very high value product