Graphene

Europeans won the Nobel Prize for their work on graphene but they are not necessarily winning on the commercial front. In fact, it is the Chinese who might overtake them.

Graphene finds users in California (Our most exciting graphene conference so far).

Each year IDTechEx Research releases its up-to-date market report on graphene and related materials: Graphene and 2D Materials: Markets, Technologies and Opportunities 2015-2025.

At IDTechEx we have been closely following and analysing the nano-carbon areas including graphene and carbon nanotubes.

About $160 million has been invested in graphene companies, excluding government and IPO financing. Companies continue to move up the value chain, from selling graphene to selling graphene based intermediary products such as inks - a welcome development from end users as it lifts their burden of fine tuning and experimentation.

2014 has been an eventful year for the graphene industry.

Graphene electrodes are one of the best prospects for enabling supercapacitors and superbatteries to take up to half of the lithium-ion battery market in 15 years - amounting to tens of billions of dollars yearly.

New research by IDTechEx in the report Graphene Markets, Technologies and Opportunities 2014-2024 External Link shows that graphene markets will grow from around $20 million in 2014 to more than $390 million in 2024, at the material level.

Questions arise as to how much supercapacitors can improve if organisations more like NASA took over. After all, if supercapacitors can replace many batteries when, as today, they store one tenth of their energy, what will happen in the marketplace if they approach the theoretical ten times the lithium-ion battery figure while acting as a near-perfect "battery"?

Graphene has already come a long way towards commercialisation, despite its short history. But really hard questions still remain about what comes next and how to grow revenues.