Sarytogan Graphite Ltd (ASX:SGA) has identified a strong market to target for potential offtake agreements after testing revealed that its Micro80C graphite product is highly suitable as a recarburizer for grey cast iron manufacturing.
During iron manufacturing, carbon is removed from the metal to improve durability and malleability. To make cast iron, 2-6% carbon is re-added to the metal in a process known as recarburizing.
The grey cast iron market is sizeable at 31 million tonnes per year, requiring about 1 million tonnes of recarburizer product to meet manufacturing demand.
High-volume offtake opportunity
“This additional high-volume use for Sarytogan Graphite could provide a base load for future expansion of the Sarytogan Graphite Project over and above the volumes envisaged in the recently completed positive pre-feasibility study,” Sarytogan Graphite managing director Sean Gregory said.
“The next step is the processing of the 20 tonnes of ore from the trial mine to produce samples for machine vendor test-work and customer qualification.”
Milling tests on a 20-tonne trial mining sample from SGA’s flagship Sarytogan Graphite Deposit in Kazakhstan are about to begin in Karaganda.
One tonne of the milled ore will then be air freighted to Australia to be manufactured into floatation concentrate, a portion of which will then be freighted to the US for purification.
The company says hundreds of kilograms of product samples will then be available for vendor machine tests and customer qualifications, a major step toward commercialising the 229-million-tonne Sarytogan resource, grading at 28.9% total graphitic carbon for 66 million tonnes of contained graphite.