CleanTech Open Award winner Urbix Resources has announced plans to build a graphite purification plant. Ground will be broken in 2018 for plant completion sometime in the second half of 2019.

Urbix executives are currently searching for the perfect site to build the proprietary facility the company is planning. They are looking at locations in Maricopa County in Arizona as well as possible sites in Nevada, California, and Hermosillo, Mexico.

Plans to move forward with the purification plant follows on the company’s Series A funding oversubscription which closed at $3.5 million dollars.

“The investment community’s response to our plans has been enthusiastic,” says Vice-Chairman, Anthony J. Parkinson. “We have every reason to believe that enthusiasm will support the creation of the facility we’ve been envisioning.”

Urbix’s state-of-the-art facility will be purifying graphite through a proprietary process that does not use high temperature furnaces or hydrofluoric acid. Urbix will be supplying their plant with graphite from Mozambique with technology partner Battery Minerals (ASX-BAT) and from diverse global supply partners.

The purification facility will process up to 2500 metric tonnes of 99.95%+ Cg graphite per month. Urbix’s phase two expansion will include the ability to make coated spherical graphite and advanced graphite derivatives including functionalized graphene nano platelets.

“What we are planning will be, upon completion, the top graphite purification plant in the United States,” says Urbix Executive Chairman, Nico Cuevas. “Eliminating industry standard processes makes it arguably the greenest graphite purification technique in the world.”

Urbix was recently tapped as one of five companies selected by the US Department of Energy to receive a technology development voucher for preliminary work oriented towards the advancements of ultra-high purity isotropic graphite for nuclear applications.

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