Purification, application and current market trend of natural graphite: A review

Graphite has a stacked planar sp2-hybridized C6 ring structure, displaying a polymorphism with rhombohedral, hexagonal, and turbostratic. Based on its structure-property relationship, it affords a variety of technologically innovative applications or performances in industries, such as lithium-ion batteries, fuel cells, two dimensional graphene, water purification, electronics, fiber optics, spintronics, refractories, electrical products, electric vehicles, etc. The monetary value of graphite depends largely on carbon content and flake size. However, the physical separation of graphite from its ore body is known to be very expensive, energy intensive and time-consuming. Hence, this study extensively describes a current purification method for producing high-quality graphite material with impurities reaching about 10-100 mg/kg, attracting a lot of end users. It also describes the potential applications of graphite materials and identifies the future scope of a new market, depending on material purity. Finally, the current and future graphite-mining countries are investigated in details.