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With a production capacity of 5000 tons per year and ownership of approximately 40 per cent of the global capacity, NanoXplore Inc.( NanoXplore) is the world’ s largest graphene producer and, critically, the only one able to supply graphene cost-competitively at industrial scale. The company produces multiple grades of graphene engineered for distinct endmarkets, from composites and plastics to oil and gas, thin films and insulation foams, backed by a decade of proprietary process IP and hands-on application expertise most competitors simply don’ t have. That expertise extends to purity as well: at 99.8 per cent for its premium grade, NanoXplore’ s graphene ranks among the purest commercially available. Rocco Marinaccio, President and CEO, charts the evolution of the company’ s expertise, from its founding to today.“ NanoXplore was founded in 2011 as a technology startup company, and operated in R & D mode until 2018, which is when I joined and when we began scaling up production. We went from 25 tons to 4000 tons, and most recently pushed that to 5000 tons. We are also the only company legally certified at large scale to produce and sell graphene in Canada, US, UK and EU, holding EPA certification, ECCC and Health Canada certification and UK and EU REACH certifications in Europe,” he begins.
Obtaining that certification is vital, given that graphene is a relatively new material that was only discovered in 2004 by two scientists at the University of Manchester, who isolated it by exfoliating graphite from a pencil. Graphene is a single-atom-thick layer of carbon that sits at the base of graphite, which itself is around 200,000 layers thick. Through a proprietary process of exfoliation, NanoXplore separates graphite into six to ten graphene layers. However, the challenge of introducing an entirely new material was that, even after it became feasible to produce it at scale, its potential commercial applications remained largely unknown. NanoXplore’ s response to that problem was to become the largest graphene producer in the world, and to subsequently acquire companies in downstream industries to demonstrate the true value of graphene.
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