How to Solve the World’s Graphite Problem – Urbix CEO

“You can’t knock on the door in this country and say ‘Hey, can I make a CO2 assessment and an ESG assessment to see how things are working out?’ And I’ll stop there,” says Nico Cuevas, CEO and co-founder of graphite processing company Urbix, conscious that our interview is being recorded.

Cuevas is talking about China and the doors he’d like to knock on are those belonging to the Urbix’s rival graphite processors.

Graphite is one of the most central minerals in EV batteries – around 30% of the active material in a battery cell is graphite but, for a variety of reasons, it has escaped the attention of both OEMs and the general public.

Cuevas, however, and his company Urbix is looking to change all that.

Being Different

Company executives can be fairly dull. They stick to the company line; they talk in vague terms about transformation and innovation.

Cuevas, however, is not one of those executives. We’re speaking on a video call for less than half an hour but, in that time, Cuevas – wearing a baseball cap throughout – manages to get soaked by the sprinklers in his back garden, pulls out PowerPoint slides to illustrate his points with enthusiasm, and, as we’re wrapping up pulls an enormous cigar out of his bag.

“Graphite is an allotrope of carbon,” he explains.

“Think of cheese or a yoghurt, they all come from milk but there are certain physical and electrochemical capabilities that graphite has that make it desirable to be utilised as the energy absorber inside of a battery – in this case, the anode.”

Graphite, as Cuevas explains, is the perfect mineral to be used in batteries.

“It’s readily available – geologically speaking. But as we add more factors to the word ‘cost,’ different parameters, that cost is starting to increase. It also has this magnificent capability – reversibility. It can actually get the lithium ions intercalated as you store energy, and then when you draw that energy from the battery, it can reverse it and get the energy out in a quite efficient manner.”

However, there are two ways of making graphite. The first is the naturally occurring graphite – the type that is geologically abundant. The other type, however, has a more convoluted route into the batteries in your cars.

“You grab needle coke and, if you heat it enough at 3000-degrees Celsius for a really long time, you turn it into graphite,” explains Cuevas.

Needle coke, if you’re unfamiliar, is a speciality grade of petroleum coke which, itself is a by-product of an oil refining process. It’s here that the problems start for graphite production.

“The process comes from petroleum, and it utilises these high-temperature ovens that consume a lot of electricity,” says Cuevas.

“So, you know, it’s kind of like trying to block the sun with one finger, right? It’s kind of hypocritical that you’re trying to serve the energy transition by making products that come from that provenance.”

Urbix, however, has developed a different way of processing the naturally occurring and abundant graphite -which is around 12% pure – into the graphite we could expect to find in the batteries of our electric cars. Holding his passport to the camera, Cuevas explains:

“Every single sheet of paper in this passport, think of it as a graphene layer, right? Once you put all those graphene layers together, you have your flake of graphite. So, imagine if I threw this passport in the sand, and in the sand, you have little grains of sand – that’s your 12% purity graphite.

“What we do is put it through a number of processes to elevate the purity to remove those little intercalating periods. And then after this, they need to shape it into a little spherical ball for many reasons – let’s just leave it at that – and that those little balls that are about one-tenth of the thickness of your hair get put on the negative side of a battery.”

“So, 50,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, on average, is consumed for every tonne of graphite end product – the spherical ball.”

“They grab it from the mine, they use hydrofluoric acid and then they shape it by attrition, then they thermally treat it for another eight days depending on what type of bottling system they use, and then they coat it at the end.”

“We use 10% of the energy, we don’t use hydrofluoric acid, we’re lower cost – we’re about 40% of the cost of the Chinese. We have 70% yields [compared to 30% for the Chinese processors] and there are certain benefits to the actual performance inside a battery that has been validated by OEMs.”

The China Problem

“The US extracts minerals and sends them to China, Australia extracts lithium and sends it to China – you get the story,” says Cuevas.

Cuevas pointing to a slide showing the US’ more than 99% dependency on Chinese-processed graphite, goes on.

“That’s one of the main topics of discussion we had at the Critical Mineral Roundtable that we were at in [Washington] DC.”

In the future, says Cuevas, it’s important that graphite processing isn’t only done in China.

“We need to come to the realisation – I was going to say it’s an inconvenient truth or whatever you want to call it – that if Urbix or if any other would-be graphite processors in the western world come online, Europe and the US will need to get their stuff, about 50-60% of it from China.

“Look at the evidence from the past two years, even if it was China or any other country, it doesn’t make sense to be reliant on one specific point of sourcing for your most critical products – whether it’s masks, ventilators, you name it. We need to be selective as to why we globalise – very selective.”

To help solve this problem, Urbix is expanding into Europe and is looking to set up shop in the UK.

“We are planning to put something up in Europe in 2025-26 and, in order for us to get there, we needed to start opening now because of how long it takes. The US will come first because we’re here and there are a lot of clients, obviously.

“But the UK seems to be more vulnerable than the rest of the European bloc for political reasons that you already know and that I can’t comment on. You guys [the UK] are pretty much a blank canvas of opportunity as it relates to energy transition, especially the products that Urbix offers.

“The UK is also pretty limited in the amount of cheap energy that it can offer. So, when you bring a product like Urbix’s that doesn’t require the amount of energy that a typical graphite processor does, we can be flexible with the UK government in setting up facilities.”

At a time when the British government seems to lurch from crisis to crackpot policy to crisis, hearing Cuevas talk positively about the British economic landscape is heartening – if a little surprising.

“I don’t want to say that we’re going to be based out of the UK for Europe, but I do want to say that it is one of the first targets that we have in mind. And what a fantastic job the UK is doing, government-wise, with understanding the necessities of developing platforms for companies like Urbix to be able to validate their product at a commercial scale.

“The US doesn’t have that – in the US we tend to throw money and everything and see what sticks. I think you guys don’t have that much money, so you’re a bit more strategic about it.”

Sorting Out Graphite

“We have kind of been lying to ourselves – not lying to ourselves but kind of completely ignoring what it takes to actually get this mineral into an adequate form to be utilised in a battery,” says Cuevas.

“We’ve been turning a blind eye to China’s processing of it. It’s an inconvenient truth.”

For Cuevas, the solutions to the over-reliance on China, the expensive and harmful methods of processing, the waste of time and money sending processed and un-processed minerals to and from China from around the world, and the unsustainable energy consumption used in processing are simple – awareness and transparency.

“You know, the Washington Post did an article on this in 2016, we were two years old as a company, and it didn’t actually get processing in per se, but it did get how people live in the graphite mining towns. But nobody paid attention to it,” he says.

“We’re modular, we’re circular. It’s important to give our OEMs a full traceability analysis. We don’t work with any of the Chinese mines. We only work with mines that we know are open to validating themselves in terms of CO2 footprint and traceability.”

It has taken more than eight years for Urbix to get to where it is now, but the company certainly seems to be on an upwards trajectory. Its product is not only necessary but also politically appealing and is sure to win a host of fans from all sides of the political spectrum. Plus, with a CEO like Cuevas in charge, selling the dream shouldn’t be a problem, either.