Why Trump is attacking China’s dominance in humble graphite

Whatever it’s been called – plumbago, black-cawke, wadd, black-lead – through century after century, graphite has been nothing if not humble. Last week, the United States slapped a 93.5 per cent duty on graphite imports from China. Share prices soared for graphite miners outside China, from Australia to Canada and South Korea. For some exporters, Trump’s tariffs are not an ill wind.

The drama comes down to the global surge in the electric vehicle (EV) market, and the humble but essential role played by graphite in lithium-ion batteries. Graphite will never play a more important role, it seems, than in the battery anodes of the future, whether in EVs, solar and wind energy storage, or smartphones.

Before the US storm over Chinese graphite blew up, I had a serendipitous encounter this summer with graphite – that greasy, black, slippery, uncharismatic carbon cousin to diamonds. I never expected that a holiday soaking up the charms of Britain’s bucolic Lake District would alert me not just to the long and largely unnoticed history of graphite, but to its diverse and dual-use properties that drew more parallels between 16th century England and US President Donald Trump’s national security obsessions than I could have imagined.

The first records of graphite coming from the Seathwaite Mine in Borrowdale in the Lake District date back to the 1550s. It is still talked of as the world’s only large graphite deposit found in a solid form, which allowed it to be cut into sticks. At first employed by Lake District farmers to mark their sheep, graphite’s use soon proliferated. It was used to rustproof cooking stoves, in glazing pots and as a lubricant in ships’ rigging. Mixed with wine or ale, it was also used medicinally to treat colic and gallstones, though its effect remains open to question.

What made graphite critical was its use as a separating layer in iron moulds. This enabled Queen Elizabeth I and her navy to produce smooth, high-quality cannonballs that likely played a part in her crushing defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Who would have thought that graphite could be so indispensable to national security?

Because of the strategic importance of graphite, the Seathwaite Mine was taken over by the Crown, and guardhouses were constructed around the mine to protect its resources – a 16th century version of export control that I am sure both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Trump’s tariff warriors would appreciate.

  

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