Tirupati Graphite commences production at Sahamamy project flake graphite production facilities

Tirupati Graphite, a UK-based graphite and graphene company, has brought the newly built flake graphite production facilities online at its Sahamamy project in Madagascar, ramping up production and commercial sales.

With the commissioning of new 18,000 tons per annum (tpa) facilities, the company has reached 30,000 tpa of flake graphite production capacity.

Shishir Poddar — Tirupati Graphite Executive Chairman said: “The start of production at the new 18,000 tpa Sahamamy project is a significant milestone for us.

“This takes our production capacity to 30,000 tons of high-quality flake graphite cementing our position as a leader in the space.

“While we will remain focussed on bringing our projects to nameplate capacity production in the immediate term, we will continue to grow to the 84,000 tpa production from our Madagascar projects and engage for furthering the development of the assets we are acquiring in Mozambique to seize opportunities the energy transition and green economy brings to us.”

The new production facilities include a new mining equipment fleet with a capacity to mine approximately 450,000 metric tons per annum run of mine graphite ore.

The facilities also consist of two pre-concentrate plants each with 600 metric tons per day ore processing capacity totaling to approximately 400,000 tpa ore processing capacity.

Further, the project includes a final concentrate facility to manufacture 18,000 tons flake graphite per annum matching the preconcentrate capacity and approximately 3-kilometre-long slurry pumping system, which will carry preconcentrate product from the preconcentrate units at the Sahasoa deposits to the final concentrate unit.

The additional facilities include stores, office, laboratory, and residential facilities, processing plant water, and tailing management facilities.

Tirupati Graphite anticipates the operations to reach the minimum stable output of 80% of nameplate capacity by March 2023.

With three 18,000 tpa facilities at Vatomina Project, Madagascar, Tirupati Graphite hopes to increase its overall flake graphite production capacity to 84,000 tpa as per the company’s modular medium-term development plan.

Tirupati Graphite is also on track to buy two bankable feasibility study (BFS) stage fully licensed flake graphite projects in Mozambique, with approximately 152 million tons JORC 2012 compliant graphite resources.