You can pull real, conductive few-layer graphene straight out of shungite - no synthesis needed (Inorganic Chemistry, 2018)

The short version

The forum already has a thread on shungite being structured like reduced graphene oxide. This is the next step up: a 2018 paper in Inorganic Chemistry (an American Chemical Society journal) showed you can physically extract real, few-layer graphene platelets out of shungite - and they come out already conductive, in the low-oxidation state that synthetic graphene needs extra chemistry to reach.

What they found

Starting from raw shungite and a purification treatment (no high-temperature synthesis, no graphite, no chemical vapor deposition), they pulled out:

- Platelets of 6-10 graphene sheets, hundreds of nanometres across
- Oxygen content only ~5%, mostly as hydroxyl groups - i.e. already close to reduced graphene oxide, not the heavily-oxidised stuff you start with in the lab
- Electrical conductivity of 1.041 x 10³ S/cm - genuinely conductive, straight out of the rock

Why it's worth knowing

Making graphene is normally an effort: grow it, or oxidise graphite to graphene oxide and then chemically reduce it back. The paper's own word for the shungite result is "unexpected" - nature handed over a few-layer, low-oxidation, conductive graphene material that only needed cleaning up, not building. A two-billion-year-old Karelian rock as a graphene feedstock.

(See also the thread on shungite being mostly reduced graphene oxide for the structural side of the same story.)

Sources

- Tamburri E. et al. (2018), "Shungite Carbon as Unexpected Natural Source of Few-Layer Graphene Platelets in a Low Oxidation State", Inorganic Chemistry: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov