Graphite Has Two Production Routes, and Most of It Isn't Mined
Synthetic graphite, made by heating petroleum coke to thousands of degrees, accounts for about 65% of supply, more than natural mining does.
Natural graphite mining itself is conventional, open-pit extraction of the metamorphic host rock covered on this material’s geology page, followed by crushing and flotation to concentrate the graphite flakes. The more distinctive part of graphite’s supply chain is that most of the world’s supply does not go through this route at all.
Making synthetic graphite
Synthetic graphite starts from petroleum coke or coal tar pitch, a byproduct of oil refining and coking, heated progressively to temperatures around 2,800 to 3,000°C in a process called graphitisation, which reorganises the carbon’s initially disordered structure into graphite’s ordered hexagonal layers, covered on this material’s materials science page. This is a genuinely energy-intensive industrial process, not a simple melt-and-cool step, and it is why synthetic graphite, while more consistent in quality, is also more expensive and more carbon-intensive to produce than natural flake graphite.
Turning flake into battery-grade spherical graphite
Whichever route the graphite comes from, feeding it into a lithium-ion battery anode requires further processing: natural flake graphite in particular is milled, spheroidised (rounded into roughly spherical particles for better electrode packing and performance), and coated, a processing chain with its own yield losses and cost, covered on this material’s supply chain page, where this specific step turns out to be the real chokepoint.
Sources: graphitisation process and spherical graphite processing draw on standard industrial and battery materials references (USGS, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence); production figures reference the production data elsewhere on this site.