Syrah Resources wants to make Vidalia the town where some of the world’s biggest automotive businesses take notice.

Chief Operating Officer Paul Jahn discussed Tuesday the company and its vision for Vidalia and the surrounding region during the August chamber luncheon of the Concordia Chamber of Commerce.

In April, the Australian graphite producer announced it had selected Vidalia for its $25 million graphite processing facility.

Tuesday, Jahn introduced the company to a crowd of approximately 50 people at the Vidalia Comfort Suites.

“As a relatively young company (started in 2010) we already have a global reach,” Jahn said.

The company is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, operates a graphite mine in Mozambique, has offices devoted to sales and marketing in Dubai and will soon operate a graphite processing facility in Vidalia, Jahn said.

The company currently has more than 650 employees, most of whom work in the graphite mine in Africa.

Jahn said the new facility should produce an initial 20 jobs he described as “relatively modest at first.” As the market grows the number of employees could expand to more than 150, Jahn said.

The average salary for workers in the new facility would be approximately $60,000, Jahn said.

“These would be challenging operator positions, very comparable to operators in chemical plants up and down the river,” Jahn said. 

As the owner of the world’s largest graphite mine and projections to capture 40 percent of the world market share in natural graphite, Jahn said Syrah is poised to be a significant player in the spherical graphite industry.

The proposed Vidalia plant will be the first integrated spherical graphite producer outside of China.

Jahn said raw graphite will be brought into New Orleans sealed in “super sacks” and shipped to Vidalia by truck. Through a chemical purifying process, Jahn said, the raw material will then be processed and reshaped into tiny spheres, machined into a shape and size preferred by lithium-ion battery manufacturers.

“The product coming in is a graphite powder and the product coming out is a graphite powder,” Jahn said.

Only a magnified view of the material will reveal the “Mr. Potato Head-like shapes” of the spherical graphite produced, Jahn said.

Byproducts from the purifying process will be sold for use in steel manufacturing. Acceptable levels of calcium chloride will be discharged into the Vidalia wastewater plant, Jahn said. In future phases, Jahn said, the levels of calcium chloride produced by the process would have to be permitted by the state. 

Responding to a question about how the material will be handled at the facility, Jahn said the graphite will be brought to Vidalia sealed in bags and come out of the facility sealed in bags. Only during the milling process in the facility, Jahn said the material will be loose.

No loose piles of graphite will be left on the property that could be transported to neighboring properties by wind, Jahn said.

Jahn said the spherical graphite that will be produced in the Vidalia facility will be used in lithium ion batteries for electric cars, trucks and buses.

With the electric vehicle industry projected to grow from 1 million electric vehicles in 2017 to more than 21 million vehicles in 2030, Jahn said the demand for spherical graphite is poised for “high growth in a sustained amount of time.”

“This is a market poised for explosive growth,” Jahn said.

As the only place to make materials for batteries outside of China, Jahn said many companies will look at Syrah as a alternative supply source of spherical graphite that is environmentally responsible, sustainable, secure and a company that values the humane treatment of workers.

Jahn said when the Syrah graphite facility is fully operational, Vidalia will be visited by key automotive companies to check out what the region has to offer.

“We are looking to make Vidalia a true showcase where automotive players say, ‘Wow that is something special.”