A Czech university chemistry team showed in 2023 that Karelian shungite works as well as glassy carbon electrodes for detecting heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, and surfactants

In January 2023 the University of Pardubice in the Czech Republic published a peer-reviewed study showing that Karelian shungite, the same Russian rock the global wellness market sells as polished pyramids, works as a working analytical-chemistry electrode. Mount a chunk of it on a stainless-steel holder, polish it, and you have a sensor that can detect lead, cadmium, dopamine, paracetamol, and surfactants in solution.

The headline finding: for some specific tasks the rock outperforms the standard reference electrode.

The samples and the comparison

The Pardubice team tested two grades of Karelian shungite:

- Noble Elite Shungite (EShE), 90.6-94.1% carbon, the dense glassy variant
- Black Raw Shungite (BShE), 62.3-64.2% carbon, the rougher, mineral-mixed variant

They benchmarked both against a glassy carbon electrode (GCE), the standard analytical-chemistry reference (a commercial GCE costs €50-150 per unit and is the industry baseline for new electrode-material studies).

Performance numbers

The shungite electrodes either matched or beat the reference on all three core electrochemical parameters: double-layer capacitance, electron-transfer rate, charge-transfer coefficient. Both shungite grades showed faster charge transfer than the glassy-carbon reference. The numerical detail sits in the published paper for anyone who wants it.

The application that surprised them

The team tested the shungite electrodes on three real analytical tasks:

1. Quantifying surfactants (sodium dodecyl sulfate and similar) by potentiometric titration
2. Detecting heavy metals (zinc, cadmium, lead) at 10-50 µg/L in acetate buffer, sensitive enough for drinking-water-quality monitoring
3. Simultaneously detecting acetaminophen (paracetamol) and dopamine in phosphate buffer

The third task is where the rock did something the reference electrode could not. Quoted from the paper:

"Individual oxidation peaks for dopamine and APAP can be distinguished using unmodified EShE, which cannot be realized on bare GCE."

The Karelian rock-electrode resolves the dopamine and acetaminophen oxidation peaks separately. The standard glassy-carbon reference does not. For pharmaceutical-and-neurotransmitter analysis, that is a meaningful advantage, the standard reference can't tell the two compounds apart in the same sample, and the Karelian rock can.

The conclusion

"The similarity between their electrochemical properties and those of conventional glassy carbon make it possible to apply noble elite shungite electrodes in different areas of electroanalysis... EShE is a more suitable material for the preparation of electrodes and may represent a cheap alternative to commercially marketed products."

In plain industrial-engineering language: take a piece of high-grade Karelian shungite, polish it, mount it. You have a working analytical-chemistry instrument, comparable to or better than the standard commercial alternative, at a fraction of the cost.

The same Karelian rock that the wellness-and-water-purification trade sells as polished spheres and pyramids is the same Karelian rock the EU chemistry laboratory uses to measure pharmaceuticals in solution.

Where the trail leads

- Open-access full text via PMC: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- MDPI Materials publisher version: mdpi.com
- PubMed indexed entry: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- University of Pardubice, Faculty of Chemical Technology: upce.cz
- Sister 2024 paper from the same group: "Shungite Paste Electrodes: Basic Characterization and Initial Examples of Applicability in Electroanalysis", Chemosensors 12(7) Article 118

Sources

- Sýs M., Bártová M., Bartoš M., Švancara I., Mikysek T. (2023), "Shungite (Mineralized Carbon) as a Promising Electrode Material for Electroanalysis", Materials 16(3), Article 1217, DOI 10.3390/ma16031217, the principal primary source for this thread
- See the natural reduced graphene oxide thread for the structural model that explains why the rock works as an electrode material
- See the mycotoxin adsorption thread for the parallel 2021 Skrypnik study on a different applied-chemistry property of the same rock
- See the Zazhoginskoe deposit by the numbers thread for the Russian-classification grades the EShE / BShE samples correspond to

Edited 2026-05-03, source audit. Cited sources verified to exist; no fabricated sources detected. Where the audit could directly read the source (live English-language papers, open Russian academic articles), claims were compared against the source content and corrections applied above. Where sources were paywalled or geo-blocked at audit time, bibliographic plausibility was verified via parallel routes (publisher index pages, PubMed/PMC mirrors, cross-citations) but the source content itself was not always directly read. If a specific claim matters to you, click the source link and verify it yourself.