Graphite: the strategic material that we could also have at home

In October, graphite, a form of extremely pure amorphous carbon, hit the headlines because China had decided to limit the export of this strategic material, threatening its global availability. Graphite is important because it is widely used for the production of batteries, fuel cells and lubricants for the mechanical, petrochemical, defense and aerospace sectors. Demand has increased in recent years as a raw material for electric vehicle batteries, and China is currently the main producer:

Yet in Piedmont there are graphite deposits that have been exploited for many decades.

In the municipality of Roure, in the Garnier area, between Val Chisone and Val Germinasca, several veins of pure graphite had been discovered at the end of the nineteenth century and were exploited for many years. Let's see what the Valchisone.it website tells us on the matter:

The mines of Garnier were discovered by Giovanni Battista Tron, born in Garnier in the Plavan hamlet: he was illiterate but certainly gifted with ingenuity, he was a "copier" like many others, in the sense that seeing others dig and sell this material he also started he looked for graphite and talc and, unlike many, he found them and was able to make fortunate direct testimony of Mr. Elia Tron.
At the end of the nineteenth century, together with his brothers Cirillo and Giuseppe, Giovanni Battista Tron founded a company and built some mills, one of which is the one in the Rocchetta area. Subsequently the mines passed to the heirs of the brothers and then, in 1920, they were absorbed by the Val Chisone Talco and Graphite Company with the exception of those of Garnier which were sold to the A. Cesana company of Pero (Milan). This company, which still exists, no longer holds the concessions on the mines which have been abandoned for years, but is still the owner of the Rocchetta mill, the sorting warehouse, now ruined, and the land where the mines are located. The mines of graphite are found in Garnier, in the municipality of Roure, at an altitude between approximately 860 and 970 meters above sea level.
The long winter in the Alps and the snow did not cause any interruption to the mine work which lasted all year round. The tunnels dug in total were four but only three were productive: the fourth, called the "research tunnel", was built in the years 1947- 48, at a lower altitude than the other tunnels (863 m above sea level) precisely to verify whether the graphite could lie at lower altitudes. It is about forty meters deep, it develops vertically and not horizontally like other mines: it is a shaft tunnel.

The town is in Alpine Piedmont, an area of ​​the Chisone valley, now perhaps better known by those who go to ski resorts, but once rich in mines of other minerals as well.

This is not the only known graphite mine in Italy: in the same period other extractions were active in the Savona area and on the Sila. There is currently an active research permit in Verbano Cusio Ossola, but the concessions in Val Chisone Val Germinasca are free, and it would be useful to restart them if only for exploratory purposes and to evaluate whether there are other areas, as is probable. Modern extraction techniques could allow us to use, in a not excessively intrusive way, deposits that were not exploitable at the time.

We often talk about the economic crisis, but what appears evident is the progressive and continuous deindustrialization of our country from an extractive point of view. Maybe we are very good at envying those who exploit their resources, when we are no longer able to exploit ours

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The article Graphite: the strategic material that we could also have at home comes from Economic Scenarios .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/grafite-il-materiale-strategico-che-potremmo-avere-anche-in-casa/ on Tue, 14 Nov 2023 16:56:20 +0000.