Graphene Opportunity: Positioned as an ultra-strong, highly conductive additive with vast cross-industry use cases, enabling lighter, faster, stronger materials at low loading levels.
Company Highlight (HG): HydroGraph Clean Power (ticker: HG) produces synthetic graphene via acetylene detonation with low energy input, high scalability, and ~80% margins.
Quality Advantage: Claims fully sp2-bonded, nano-scale graphene with superior performance versus graphite-exfoliation peers, anticipating industry consolidation due to quality gaps.
Defense Focus: Strong defense demand, ongoing collaborations with the US Army and Navy, and expected participation in an Austin-based Graphene Innovation Consortium.
Energy Storage: Big-picture upside in batteries and energy systems, with expectations for meaningful EV battery and lubrication improvements over the next few years.
Industrial Applications: Near-term opportunities in composites, coatings, plastics, concrete, and potential to make vehicles and aircraft lighter and more durable.
Growth Plans: New Austin HQ, large-scale Houston facility, and planned uplisting to Nasdaq to support expansion and broader commercial rollout by 2027–2030.
Transcript
It is the strongest and most conductive material ever discovered. It is really the most powerful material that we've ever found. You can put graphine in almost any material really known to man, whether you mentioned a few, concrete, carbon fiber, you name it. It works well with other carbon materials and it works well with other graphines. Um, so truly an unlimited market potential here because there are just an unlimited amount of use cases. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Tagert, welcoming you here for a really interesting conversation that we're going to have. Um, it's on a it's on a material known as graphine, which um I feel like I'm a little bit behind the curve. I sort of heard the word graphine out there, but I didn't really know exactly what it was or what it could be used for. And um I will say I I'll introduce her in just a moment, but um I'll say I've rarely had the um sort of immediate demand that I started receiving around the turn of this year um from listeners here who really wanted to see an interview done on graphine and its potential uses. Um but specifically um the name of this particular company and particular executive kept coming up and um uh basically as I always like to tell you guys, you ask, I listen. So um based on popular demand, we're going to cover this topic. Now for those who like me did not know what graphine is, it's a two-dimensional variety of the element carbon, right? C on the uh on the periodic table. Um it's what's known as a carbon allotrope. Uh and that means basically it consists of a single layer of carbon atoms tightly bound in a like a hexagonal honeycomb lattice. and it's known for its exceptionally high tensile strength, something like uh 200 times the strength of steel. Um it's an excellent um electrical conductor. It's transparent uh when you look at it. Um and being the thinnest two-dimensional material in the world um on a microscopic scale, graphine is actually the strongest material ever mentioned. So, uh this thing has a ton of potential commercial uses. Um it can be used to enhance batteries and have them charge faster. Uh create durable anti-corrosion coatings, flexible electronics, um higher efficiency solar panels, advanced biomedical applications like drug delivery. Um it acts as a super material additive and composits strengthening everything from they say tennis rackets to car tires. So to learn more about this potentially wonder material uh and uh how it might transform the world of uh well the world that we live in going forward, we're very fortunate to be here with Kirsten Brewer and I really hope I pronounced your last name correctly there Kirsten. She is president uh co-founder and chief executive officer of hydrocl sorry sorry hydrograph clean power and um if the market reaction uh is is any indicator of uh the true uh potential for this company uh its stock uh is up 1,900% in the past 12 months uh just 164% uh in the year so far here in 2026 and 90% in the past month. Those are pretty stunning uh numbers there. So anyways, Kirsten, it's a real pleasure to meet you. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. Okay, so I did my best job there to give just a really concise, you know, starting off point for graphine. Um, first off, how'd I do? Did I get relatively close to what this thing is and what it does? >> No, that was great. So, as you mentioned, it is the strongest and most conductive material ever discovered. And it was actually >> most conductive as well >> as well. >> Wow. Okay. >> This is all depending on the materials you're using it with, how it's processed, the quality of the graphine. So there are a lot of uh variables there, but it is really the most powerful material that we've ever found. Um, and as you mentioned as well, it's usually an additive. So anything that's two-dimensional, you're really adding into a 3D counterpart. Not to over complicate it, but really graphine is um you know it is kind of a disruptive technology but we don't compete with other materials. You can put graphine in almost any material really known to man whether you mentioned a few concrete, carbon fiber, you name it. It works well with other carbon materials and it works well with other graphines. Um, so truly an unlimited market potential here because there are just an unlimited amount of use cases and as it's brand new, we're still kind of figuring out how to use it. Um, it was discovered in 2004 at the University of Manchester with the infamous Scotch tape method where researchers um quite literally put a piece of scotch tape on graphite eventually isolating one atomic layer. So because that was part of the discovery, we thought that this material existed likely from the 50s. It was eventually confirmed. They won the Nobel Prize and since then customers or companies have been kind of racing to produce high quality graphine. Most companies are starting with graphite as a feed stock and they're either mechanically or chemically exfoliating it to try to get down to that one atomic layer. Hydrograph is very different. We are a synthetic production company. So we detonate hydrocarbon gases exactly as it sounds. Um we explode acetylene which is our favorite hydrocarbon though all are covered in our patent acetylene and oxygen. We basically pump these gases into a steel chamber. Um our reactor is kind of like an engine where we have four 70 L chambers very thick carbon steel and then we have electrodes inside that fire. It destabilizes the acetylene molecules. You would know acetylene as a welding gas. um most common use. So it's very volatile. You can imagine it's bringing a lot of energy with it. So we need very very little energy to initiate that reaction. We create an explosion. And if you could imagine a puff of smoke being generated in that chamber that's effectively our product. So that puff of smoke settles and it's a very very black fluffy powder that we then package and sell to our customers. So simple in theory and it's great because like I mentioned no energy to initiate the reaction and our only byproduct is sin gas or synthesis gas and that is a commodity u material so no waste and very very low energy usage and extremely scalable. >> I mean we're going to get get into this but I mean this just sounds almost too good to be true. Um when you say really no energy required or very little energy required um does that also mean like very low cost to produce? >> It is very low cost to produce. I do um there are some companies that have um graphite as a feed stock that they might be more um cost effective on a tonnage basis but once you're using the graphine so we in the industry would say the loading level. So you're usually using 1% or less. For us, a lot of the applications we work on, we're using 0.01% or even lower. So once you factor in the amount of graphine that's being used, we are the most cost effective material in the industry, even though we are um despite having a very um low capex. We are on the higher end of the market and that is just because of the performance that we provide and we're at roughly 80% margin like I mentioned, very scalable. We can build these reactors in a matter of months. Um and the capex is very very low for the industry. >> Okay. Um all right. So uh the again I'm I'm very new to this space but the thing that I've I've sort of I think I've learned is the real pursuit here is is high quality graphine. Um, and if I understood the differential between sort of your company versus everybody else is most everybody else is um starting with graphite or whatever and they're they're they're trying to um you know reduce it down to that that single layer thick um state where you're kind of lab growing the single level state itself. You're kind of organically creating it, right? Am I more or less correct here? >> Correct. We basically convert the carbon in a gas into a solid form in that exclusion. Um and so most of the companies um to not be too critical of the industry, they're selling what's closer to graphite powder just because it's so extremely difficult to get those carbon layers to separate. Carbon really wants to stick together. So it's inc it's incredibly challenging to really get high quality graphine derived from graphite. I think most of these synthetic producers are likely at the higher end in terms of performance. Um, and it's really not only about carbon content. A lot of graphine producers talk about carbon content, but we know that, you know, diamonds are pure carbon, graphite is pure carbon. Those don't have nanomaterial traits. So, different carbon allotropes. You really need it to be a nanomaterial, meaning it's sp2 bonding. And I know that's sounds very technical, but that's really um a lot of companies don't list that on their data sheets. or worse, when there's third party testing to verify the quality of the graphine, a lot of the graphine being sold does not match what the companies are claiming that they actually produce. So, I think there's going to be a lot of consolidation in the industry, but um really with the reputation that we've created working with very large companies and more uh recently the US military, we are very confident in our ability to produce and scale to what we believe is the highest quality product in the market. >> Okay. and and highest quality product were there again which I I assume is just the best single layer sheet of of carbon atoms arranged in the the graphian way um what what happens with lower quality even start from here because you mentioned the word powder like when you create this as I understand it very imperfectly it's a layer right so it's it's I almost imagine like you know a sheet of a two-dimensional sheet like this that's just all carbon atoms, you know, all the way around. How do you actually work with it? Like, do you work with sheets? Do you grind it into a powder? Like, what form factor do you use graphine in? >> I'm going to try not to go too technical here, but our graphine is um not strictly single layers. So, we're between two and seven layers, but it's called turboratic graphine, which means the force of the explosion really creates a space in between those layers, which is really what you want because when you're using the graphine, you want those sheets to separate. So, we have not only um more nanocale graphine, but again, we are, I believe, the only fully sp2 bonded graphine, meaning we're the most nanomaterial like graphine in the industry. But our lateral particle size is 20 to 50 nanometers. So incredibly small. Most graphine in the industry is in the micron scale. So about a thousand times larger. And what that means is to talk about quality. If you can kind of imagine these little sheets of graphine kind of looking like the honeycomb lattice, what you want, and this is kind of the definition of sp2 bonding, the two carbon atoms um connected, is um really what happens is you have that additional electron on the top and it's kind of shooting across this lattice. I'm trying to explain this in the simplest way. So these these separate and they basically create more nucleation sites. So they start the crystallization process to give polymer chemistry as an example um very evenly throughout a material. A lot of other companies if you could kind of zoom into their graphine um dimensions and size they might have holes in the lattice. There might be impurities on the lattice and all of that disrupts graphine strength and conductivity. So that's where I was going. >> There are many I guess layers to what would constitute high quality graphine. And we are very very lucky that our patent really allows that in one step with no additional effort. So exactly what we produce in that chamber is exactly what we sell. >> Okay. Um but quality matters basically because if you value the attributes of graphine like strength or conductivity, the lower quality, the less strong and less conductive it is. And you're nodding as I'm saying this. Um okay. And and again I'm just trying to help the average person get their brain around this. If if I were to buy some graphine from you, >> what does that look like? Is it does it look like a brick? Does it look like sheets of paper? Does it look like ground powder? How does what form factor does it usually come in? >> Very very fluffy black powder. Um so very light um you know high volume material. You can um put it into kind of a solid form for shipping, but mostly we're we're selling just the powder as is or we might create a dispersion with it or sell it in a paste just because it's easier for the customer to use. Okay. And I I don't want to get too complicated on this, but again, just to help people understand this. So, let's take a use case or two of somebody that wants to use graphine to make something either more conductive or stronger. >> Um, what do you do with the graphine? Do you do you um just mix it into your concrete if you're making concrete? Do you do you um you know melt it down along with whatever conductive metal you're going to use to create you know electrical wiring or whatever like how how does it get h how do you take graphine and then make something better with it? >> Every material is going to have a slightly different process. So with thermoplastics we often make a master batch that's a highly loaded um batch of plastic that then we can melt down and work with other plastics with. Um so for example with concrete it is almost as simple as just mixing in um though there is of course a process behind each one of these examples and a lot of what we do um we're working with the army on ballistic protection materials. We're working with different uh plastics companies for example to produce nylon fibers um really all areas but every material is going to have a slightly different process associated with it. >> Okay. Um, the way you described it, it has all these great benefits, but it's also sounds like pretty darn cheap to produce. So, is it a is it like this wonderful transformer existing products um and processes where like I can get graphine added to it to to make it better. I can make my concrete stronger. I can make my metals more conductive, you know, whatever. Um, and it doesn't really cost me that much to do so because graphine is just so darn cheap. >> Exactly. So you can kind of think of it that we make things lighter, faster, stronger, and it's more of an enabling technology. >> Okay? Almost like a probably a terrible analogy, but like the old Intel inside, our microprocessors are so great. You put our chip in, your computer's going to do a lot better. It's like a graphine inside product where if it's got graphine in it, it's going to be stronger, faster, better, whatever. >> Exactly. >> Okay. All right. Um, you mentioned that it's 200 times stronger than steel. Um, from a conductivity standpoint, I I think, and I could be wrong on this, but I think before I heard of graphine that I was told that silver was the most conductive element. How much more conductive is graphine than silver? >> There's a bit of nuance to this. And so for us, this is a newer area that we, I would say, would like to see more data sets in. So, it's really depending on how the graphine is used, but at least theoretically, if you have a large um sheet of graphine and it is because the the difficulty with metals is graphine's melting point is lower than what would combine within a lot of metals, okay? >> But you could use centering. There are a number of ways that we can improve um metals, but we have a number of ongoing studies and we should be able to release the data from those studies soon. >> Okay. uh gut feel. I mean, like, are we talking 10% more conductive, 20% more conductive, or like some sort of multiple just the way that that it's so much stronger than steel? >> I think as we improve in our understanding of graphine and the processing of graphine, I think we'll see multiples. >> Okay. All right. Um, so I listed, you know, sort of a summary that I got from the internet of of applications of graphine, but obviously you're running a company and help co-found this company um to address the market opportunity here. What do you see as the biggest, you know, societal gains and just biggest commercial opportunities for for companies like yours with graphine? It's a hard question because there's really so much variety there. I would say a lot of the interest that we have incoming is defense related. I think big picture it's going to be more in energy. I think that the gains that we can see with graphine can create radically different um not only chips but batteries um lubricants and when you improve you know the energy of different systems really everything functions so much better. Um, apart from that, you know, we're going to have taller, stronger buildings, more powerful vehicles. Um, really the the future is kind of unlimited. Early days, a lot of people gave some silly examples about space elevators. And I'm sure that is coming, but it's decades away, I would say. >> Okay. I think that actually maybe the first time I did hear if graphine was a graphine related space elevator. Um uh I I also heard too I think I mentioned it in the intro um that there may be some really interesting um health applications of this especially in things like drug delivery. How does graphine do that? >> Yes. So um we don't work on that specifically but there is proof that you can put graphine in different vaccines and it kind of is a delivery mechanism so the drug can get to the right part of the body which I think is is very very interesting. And we're going to have nanocale robotics with graphine, all sorts of applications. We do work with a company called Hawkeye Bio and they produce a lung cancer bio sensor that can detect lung cancer I believe six months sooner than any other test on the market. And they'll be rolling out additional bio sensors for um all types of cancer. That really should kind of democratize that process and allow access to many more people that could otherwise not probably afford it. >> Okay. So you said graphine was um I think sort of officially we'll say proven in the lab in 2004. I think you said it was maybe theorized since the 50s >> and again from the reading I did it sounds like it is naturally occurring. Um but sort of in small amounts and I guess we just hadn't actually observed it until 2004. First off to be clear you said it was discovered using the scotch tape method. I mean it like literally and you tell me but I mean literally they put like scotch tape I don't know whether it was on um graphite or not but just you know ripped it off and were like oh we think we just got you know a layer of this and that's graphine. Is that pretty much how it was proven >> more or less? I don't know how many times they had to do that over and over probably sticking tape together to try to isolate that one atomic layer but they did eventually prove it quite literally with scotch tape. >> Wow. That's just that's crazy. Okay. So, it it's we've we've confirmed it existed. What that's a little over 20 years ago >> and maybe people have been reading about it for a couple years. Um, but it's something that we, you know, right now it's just kind of theoretical, right? I mean, there's there's I I haven't seen at least anything that says, you know, new and improved with graphine. Um, to the person who's listening to this conversation, Kirsten, saying, "I mean, this just sounds way too good to be true. I mean, this thing just seems to do everything and it's, you know, super low cost to produce and stuff." What would you say to them? H how would you actually say, "Look, trust me, this is actually it's really real and it's really going to make your life better." >> I mean, I think lots of new technologies can come across like that. If we could imagine having what we had have now decades ago, it would have seemed impossible as well. I think, you know, graphine really is on the bleeding edge. And I think that most of what we're going to uncover, we can't exactly fathom now. We're really just starting to learn how to use it. But there are products that already have graphine. I do think that it is in industry more than what people realize. And I think that um you know they say within the industry it's really the next two years that this is going to fully take off. >> Okay. And that was my next question for you is like like when when will we kind of see the benefits of this? Whether we even know it's graphine or not but we're just like oh my god, you know I'm making this up like my car's tires just got so much. I'm never having to replace my tires anymore. They're so much stronger than the old version or like when will we actually know we're living in a graphine era? I mean, I think it's going to begin in the next two years. I would say by 2030, we're going to have a solid amount of products that people will have heard of graphine. It will be in a lot of different materials and I think that's when it's going to be very exciting. >> Okay. Um, so I mentioned earlier your the stock performance of your company and and folks, you know, this not an official endorsement and past performance is no guarantee of future performance and all that stuff. Um but clearly uh the market has woken up to the potential here. Um I guess first question is is why do you think that the stock performance has been so dramatic in the past year? Is it literally just an an appreciation by Wall Street that graphine's important and they're pouring into all sorts of companies or is there something specific that happened with hydrograph? Um what's driving this this latest interest? I I do think it's quite specific to hydrograph and I I really believe it is um you know the the beauty of the patents that we have. It's an incredibly simple method. It's scalable. We have global coverage and um we have provably the best performance by a long shot in the industry. And I think that um we probably hadn't socialized the company enough in previous years. And now that we've taken that more seriously and are, you know, attending conferences, um, things exactly like what you and I are doing podcast like this, >> it all it all really helps. And I think, you know, we've picked up a lot of, um, very, very supportive shareholders over the past year, and all of that has really helped create something that um, I think we deserve the attention. I think that this company really is going to to change a lot. And to speak a little bit more about some of the recent attention, we've been working with the Army and the Navy for about two years and the Army has expressed interest in building an innovation hub in Austin and to our knowledge, we're the only graphine company that's really made the cut. So they've been very selective. We believe it will be called the Graphine Innovation Consoria and I believe that we will be there with other defense companies, other battery producers potentially. So as we receive more information from the military, we will of course update the market. But all very very good signs uh for us. >> Okay. And um I mean it sounds like you're you're projecting this is going to be like a lot of transformative um technological transitions where they they generally started in the military, you know, whether it's the internet or wireless communications or you know I all the research that went into now sending rockets to the moon and all that stuff. So this is seems like it's just another transformation in that similar chain. Correct. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. Okay. Um so let's see here. Uh there are um you know there's there's I'm just trying to think of the ways in which we will experience this in the world and and I know to a certain extent it's a little bit like well we're still figuring out what this wonder thing can do and there's probably lots of applications or solutions we can't even imagine just yet. But, you know, we we live in a just taking America for a moment, you know, we live in a country that um has an aging infrastructure, right? So, we have all sorts of roads and bridges uh whatnot that are dams that are going to need to be rebuilt going forward. presumably if they are, you know, if they're rebuilt or renovated with graphine related uh technology, um, you know, we may get a much longer shelf life out of the next generation of things that we're building. Um, I know we want to, you know, dramatically increase our electricity production as a country. Um, and we want to electrify, you know, the transportation grid if possible and all sorts of things. I mean, I can just sort of see all these things that graphine, if it does what what you're purporting it could do. Um, you know, we're going to we're going to see this as something that will sort of both accelerate uh the the roll out of all this, but also give us better of everything, right? Like it'll it'll perform better, but it'll last better. um you know some if somebody has an electric car um new batteries that are made you know one of the one of the concerns about owning an electric car is well when the battery you know gets used up um I got to you know if if I want to go to replace the battery it might cost as much as just buying a new car that's that's today's issue I'm assuming you might be able to graph might be able to extend the battery life you know of a car battery by years decades etc all of a sudden making that kind of a non-issue. I mean, there's just I'm thinking through all this in real time, but like am I am I somewhat accurately describing what you think graphine is bringing to the the future for us both as individual consumers, but also, you know, a nation at large? >> No, absolutely. And I think it's it's time and money, right? A lot of the really high-tech, a lot of very exciting um new applications with graphine will take more time to really work out the process and the research behind it, but we are already on our way there. And I think there's going to be significant improvements um even with you know automobile batteries really in the near future. >> Okay. And even with the automobile I mean again I'm yeah the tires are going to be better as we said earlier but the battery might be better if it's a an electrical or if it's a hybrid. Um, but presumably might the chassis be lighter but also stronger if if graphine can be included into the the manufacturing process for the actual, you know, paneling and and uh uh you know metals that we're putting into the car. >> Absolutely possible. >> Yeah. I mean, again, like I said, I'm just sort of thinking through this in real time, but like you know, you can make airplanes, right? Well, make them make them lighter but stronger. And you know, all of a sudden they're a lot more fuel efficient, right? Um, you know, sending things up into space. Again, thinking big here. You know, you build a rocket out of something that's got a lot of graphine in it. Well, you know, all of a sudden you can get a much bigger payload into space for the same amount of fuel. >> Completely. >> All right. So, I'm not being crazy here with my my brain leaping to all this. >> Some of these some of these will take more research, but it it is absolutely possible. >> Okay. All right. Well, you kind of, you know, really expanded my thinking here and it's super exciting and super interesting. Um, and I'm I'm really hopeful that your company and all the graphy and other companies out there, you know, help accelerate us to this new really cool future. Um, I guess first on the just the technology itself or its applications, is there anything else that's worth putting on, you know, the average viewer's radar screen right now about it that I just haven't thought to ask you? in terms of our technology, >> terms of your technology, just just the applications of graphine or things to know about it. >> Um, you know, I think I think we've covered most, I guess, just kind of as a an update on where we are. I mentioned the graphine innovation consorcia um should be built in 2027. We're opening a headquarters here in Austin in about two weeks and then a large scale production facility just outside of Houston. So we will um as mentioned a lot of our interest is in defense right now but we work a lot with composites coatings and we will be rapidly expanding the applications that we're pursuing. I think I mentioned that we're going to be looking much more into um metals. We will be looking at um you know additional bio sensors and so it's kind of challenging in a company like this because you can do everything but that that means that you need to be much more selective really when you're getting started. But as soon as we see revenue, we'll be able to fund um so many more projects that are going to be u much more highly engineered. >> All right. Well, for folks that would like to learn more about uh Hydrograph um and invest in it. Um tell them where to go and obviously tell them what the ticker for your company is. >> Of course. So we are hydrograph.com. We are on the CSE. Our ticker is HG, but close to May, we will be uplisting to NASDAQ. So, we will also be releasing more information on that change. >> All right, great. Uh, and Kirstston, when I edit this, I'll put the um URL and the ticker up on the screen so folks know exactly where to go. Um, well, Kirsten, this has been super fascinating. Um, I very much appreciate everybody who put both Graphine and your company and you on my radar. And let's just say you've got an open invitation here to when there's um you know any potential really big meaningful milestones in terms of what's happening with graphine um or what's happening with your company, come back on the channel here and we'll have another one of these conversations. >> Sure. Would love to. Thank you. >> All right. Oh, thank you very much everybody else. Thanks so much for watching.
Is Graphene The Next Big Boom? | Kjirstin Breure
Summary
Transcript
It is the strongest and most conductive material ever discovered. It is really the most powerful material that we've ever found. You can put graphine in almost any material really known to man, whether you mentioned a few, concrete, carbon fiber, you name it. It works well with other carbon materials and it works well with other graphines. Um, so truly an unlimited market potential here because there are just an unlimited amount of use cases. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Tagert, welcoming you here for a really interesting conversation that we're going to have. Um, it's on a it's on a material known as graphine, which um I feel like I'm a little bit behind the curve. I sort of heard the word graphine out there, but I didn't really know exactly what it was or what it could be used for. And um I will say I I'll introduce her in just a moment, but um I'll say I've rarely had the um sort of immediate demand that I started receiving around the turn of this year um from listeners here who really wanted to see an interview done on graphine and its potential uses. Um but specifically um the name of this particular company and particular executive kept coming up and um uh basically as I always like to tell you guys, you ask, I listen. So um based on popular demand, we're going to cover this topic. Now for those who like me did not know what graphine is, it's a two-dimensional variety of the element carbon, right? C on the uh on the periodic table. Um it's what's known as a carbon allotrope. Uh and that means basically it consists of a single layer of carbon atoms tightly bound in a like a hexagonal honeycomb lattice. and it's known for its exceptionally high tensile strength, something like uh 200 times the strength of steel. Um it's an excellent um electrical conductor. It's transparent uh when you look at it. Um and being the thinnest two-dimensional material in the world um on a microscopic scale, graphine is actually the strongest material ever mentioned. So, uh this thing has a ton of potential commercial uses. Um it can be used to enhance batteries and have them charge faster. Uh create durable anti-corrosion coatings, flexible electronics, um higher efficiency solar panels, advanced biomedical applications like drug delivery. Um it acts as a super material additive and composits strengthening everything from they say tennis rackets to car tires. So to learn more about this potentially wonder material uh and uh how it might transform the world of uh well the world that we live in going forward, we're very fortunate to be here with Kirsten Brewer and I really hope I pronounced your last name correctly there Kirsten. She is president uh co-founder and chief executive officer of hydrocl sorry sorry hydrograph clean power and um if the market reaction uh is is any indicator of uh the true uh potential for this company uh its stock uh is up 1,900% in the past 12 months uh just 164% uh in the year so far here in 2026 and 90% in the past month. Those are pretty stunning uh numbers there. So anyways, Kirsten, it's a real pleasure to meet you. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. Okay, so I did my best job there to give just a really concise, you know, starting off point for graphine. Um, first off, how'd I do? Did I get relatively close to what this thing is and what it does? >> No, that was great. So, as you mentioned, it is the strongest and most conductive material ever discovered. And it was actually >> most conductive as well >> as well. >> Wow. Okay. >> This is all depending on the materials you're using it with, how it's processed, the quality of the graphine. So there are a lot of uh variables there, but it is really the most powerful material that we've ever found. Um, and as you mentioned as well, it's usually an additive. So anything that's two-dimensional, you're really adding into a 3D counterpart. Not to over complicate it, but really graphine is um you know it is kind of a disruptive technology but we don't compete with other materials. You can put graphine in almost any material really known to man whether you mentioned a few concrete, carbon fiber, you name it. It works well with other carbon materials and it works well with other graphines. Um, so truly an unlimited market potential here because there are just an unlimited amount of use cases and as it's brand new, we're still kind of figuring out how to use it. Um, it was discovered in 2004 at the University of Manchester with the infamous Scotch tape method where researchers um quite literally put a piece of scotch tape on graphite eventually isolating one atomic layer. So because that was part of the discovery, we thought that this material existed likely from the 50s. It was eventually confirmed. They won the Nobel Prize and since then customers or companies have been kind of racing to produce high quality graphine. Most companies are starting with graphite as a feed stock and they're either mechanically or chemically exfoliating it to try to get down to that one atomic layer. Hydrograph is very different. We are a synthetic production company. So we detonate hydrocarbon gases exactly as it sounds. Um we explode acetylene which is our favorite hydrocarbon though all are covered in our patent acetylene and oxygen. We basically pump these gases into a steel chamber. Um our reactor is kind of like an engine where we have four 70 L chambers very thick carbon steel and then we have electrodes inside that fire. It destabilizes the acetylene molecules. You would know acetylene as a welding gas. um most common use. So it's very volatile. You can imagine it's bringing a lot of energy with it. So we need very very little energy to initiate that reaction. We create an explosion. And if you could imagine a puff of smoke being generated in that chamber that's effectively our product. So that puff of smoke settles and it's a very very black fluffy powder that we then package and sell to our customers. So simple in theory and it's great because like I mentioned no energy to initiate the reaction and our only byproduct is sin gas or synthesis gas and that is a commodity u material so no waste and very very low energy usage and extremely scalable. >> I mean we're going to get get into this but I mean this just sounds almost too good to be true. Um when you say really no energy required or very little energy required um does that also mean like very low cost to produce? >> It is very low cost to produce. I do um there are some companies that have um graphite as a feed stock that they might be more um cost effective on a tonnage basis but once you're using the graphine so we in the industry would say the loading level. So you're usually using 1% or less. For us, a lot of the applications we work on, we're using 0.01% or even lower. So once you factor in the amount of graphine that's being used, we are the most cost effective material in the industry, even though we are um despite having a very um low capex. We are on the higher end of the market and that is just because of the performance that we provide and we're at roughly 80% margin like I mentioned, very scalable. We can build these reactors in a matter of months. Um and the capex is very very low for the industry. >> Okay. Um all right. So uh the again I'm I'm very new to this space but the thing that I've I've sort of I think I've learned is the real pursuit here is is high quality graphine. Um, and if I understood the differential between sort of your company versus everybody else is most everybody else is um starting with graphite or whatever and they're they're they're trying to um you know reduce it down to that that single layer thick um state where you're kind of lab growing the single level state itself. You're kind of organically creating it, right? Am I more or less correct here? >> Correct. We basically convert the carbon in a gas into a solid form in that exclusion. Um and so most of the companies um to not be too critical of the industry, they're selling what's closer to graphite powder just because it's so extremely difficult to get those carbon layers to separate. Carbon really wants to stick together. So it's inc it's incredibly challenging to really get high quality graphine derived from graphite. I think most of these synthetic producers are likely at the higher end in terms of performance. Um, and it's really not only about carbon content. A lot of graphine producers talk about carbon content, but we know that, you know, diamonds are pure carbon, graphite is pure carbon. Those don't have nanomaterial traits. So, different carbon allotropes. You really need it to be a nanomaterial, meaning it's sp2 bonding. And I know that's sounds very technical, but that's really um a lot of companies don't list that on their data sheets. or worse, when there's third party testing to verify the quality of the graphine, a lot of the graphine being sold does not match what the companies are claiming that they actually produce. So, I think there's going to be a lot of consolidation in the industry, but um really with the reputation that we've created working with very large companies and more uh recently the US military, we are very confident in our ability to produce and scale to what we believe is the highest quality product in the market. >> Okay. and and highest quality product were there again which I I assume is just the best single layer sheet of of carbon atoms arranged in the the graphian way um what what happens with lower quality even start from here because you mentioned the word powder like when you create this as I understand it very imperfectly it's a layer right so it's it's I almost imagine like you know a sheet of a two-dimensional sheet like this that's just all carbon atoms, you know, all the way around. How do you actually work with it? Like, do you work with sheets? Do you grind it into a powder? Like, what form factor do you use graphine in? >> I'm going to try not to go too technical here, but our graphine is um not strictly single layers. So, we're between two and seven layers, but it's called turboratic graphine, which means the force of the explosion really creates a space in between those layers, which is really what you want because when you're using the graphine, you want those sheets to separate. So, we have not only um more nanocale graphine, but again, we are, I believe, the only fully sp2 bonded graphine, meaning we're the most nanomaterial like graphine in the industry. But our lateral particle size is 20 to 50 nanometers. So incredibly small. Most graphine in the industry is in the micron scale. So about a thousand times larger. And what that means is to talk about quality. If you can kind of imagine these little sheets of graphine kind of looking like the honeycomb lattice, what you want, and this is kind of the definition of sp2 bonding, the two carbon atoms um connected, is um really what happens is you have that additional electron on the top and it's kind of shooting across this lattice. I'm trying to explain this in the simplest way. So these these separate and they basically create more nucleation sites. So they start the crystallization process to give polymer chemistry as an example um very evenly throughout a material. A lot of other companies if you could kind of zoom into their graphine um dimensions and size they might have holes in the lattice. There might be impurities on the lattice and all of that disrupts graphine strength and conductivity. So that's where I was going. >> There are many I guess layers to what would constitute high quality graphine. And we are very very lucky that our patent really allows that in one step with no additional effort. So exactly what we produce in that chamber is exactly what we sell. >> Okay. Um but quality matters basically because if you value the attributes of graphine like strength or conductivity, the lower quality, the less strong and less conductive it is. And you're nodding as I'm saying this. Um okay. And and again I'm just trying to help the average person get their brain around this. If if I were to buy some graphine from you, >> what does that look like? Is it does it look like a brick? Does it look like sheets of paper? Does it look like ground powder? How does what form factor does it usually come in? >> Very very fluffy black powder. Um so very light um you know high volume material. You can um put it into kind of a solid form for shipping, but mostly we're we're selling just the powder as is or we might create a dispersion with it or sell it in a paste just because it's easier for the customer to use. Okay. And I I don't want to get too complicated on this, but again, just to help people understand this. So, let's take a use case or two of somebody that wants to use graphine to make something either more conductive or stronger. >> Um, what do you do with the graphine? Do you do you um just mix it into your concrete if you're making concrete? Do you do you um you know melt it down along with whatever conductive metal you're going to use to create you know electrical wiring or whatever like how how does it get h how do you take graphine and then make something better with it? >> Every material is going to have a slightly different process. So with thermoplastics we often make a master batch that's a highly loaded um batch of plastic that then we can melt down and work with other plastics with. Um so for example with concrete it is almost as simple as just mixing in um though there is of course a process behind each one of these examples and a lot of what we do um we're working with the army on ballistic protection materials. We're working with different uh plastics companies for example to produce nylon fibers um really all areas but every material is going to have a slightly different process associated with it. >> Okay. Um, the way you described it, it has all these great benefits, but it's also sounds like pretty darn cheap to produce. So, is it a is it like this wonderful transformer existing products um and processes where like I can get graphine added to it to to make it better. I can make my concrete stronger. I can make my metals more conductive, you know, whatever. Um, and it doesn't really cost me that much to do so because graphine is just so darn cheap. >> Exactly. So you can kind of think of it that we make things lighter, faster, stronger, and it's more of an enabling technology. >> Okay? Almost like a probably a terrible analogy, but like the old Intel inside, our microprocessors are so great. You put our chip in, your computer's going to do a lot better. It's like a graphine inside product where if it's got graphine in it, it's going to be stronger, faster, better, whatever. >> Exactly. >> Okay. All right. Um, you mentioned that it's 200 times stronger than steel. Um, from a conductivity standpoint, I I think, and I could be wrong on this, but I think before I heard of graphine that I was told that silver was the most conductive element. How much more conductive is graphine than silver? >> There's a bit of nuance to this. And so for us, this is a newer area that we, I would say, would like to see more data sets in. So, it's really depending on how the graphine is used, but at least theoretically, if you have a large um sheet of graphine and it is because the the difficulty with metals is graphine's melting point is lower than what would combine within a lot of metals, okay? >> But you could use centering. There are a number of ways that we can improve um metals, but we have a number of ongoing studies and we should be able to release the data from those studies soon. >> Okay. uh gut feel. I mean, like, are we talking 10% more conductive, 20% more conductive, or like some sort of multiple just the way that that it's so much stronger than steel? >> I think as we improve in our understanding of graphine and the processing of graphine, I think we'll see multiples. >> Okay. All right. Um, so I listed, you know, sort of a summary that I got from the internet of of applications of graphine, but obviously you're running a company and help co-found this company um to address the market opportunity here. What do you see as the biggest, you know, societal gains and just biggest commercial opportunities for for companies like yours with graphine? It's a hard question because there's really so much variety there. I would say a lot of the interest that we have incoming is defense related. I think big picture it's going to be more in energy. I think that the gains that we can see with graphine can create radically different um not only chips but batteries um lubricants and when you improve you know the energy of different systems really everything functions so much better. Um, apart from that, you know, we're going to have taller, stronger buildings, more powerful vehicles. Um, really the the future is kind of unlimited. Early days, a lot of people gave some silly examples about space elevators. And I'm sure that is coming, but it's decades away, I would say. >> Okay. I think that actually maybe the first time I did hear if graphine was a graphine related space elevator. Um uh I I also heard too I think I mentioned it in the intro um that there may be some really interesting um health applications of this especially in things like drug delivery. How does graphine do that? >> Yes. So um we don't work on that specifically but there is proof that you can put graphine in different vaccines and it kind of is a delivery mechanism so the drug can get to the right part of the body which I think is is very very interesting. And we're going to have nanocale robotics with graphine, all sorts of applications. We do work with a company called Hawkeye Bio and they produce a lung cancer bio sensor that can detect lung cancer I believe six months sooner than any other test on the market. And they'll be rolling out additional bio sensors for um all types of cancer. That really should kind of democratize that process and allow access to many more people that could otherwise not probably afford it. >> Okay. So you said graphine was um I think sort of officially we'll say proven in the lab in 2004. I think you said it was maybe theorized since the 50s >> and again from the reading I did it sounds like it is naturally occurring. Um but sort of in small amounts and I guess we just hadn't actually observed it until 2004. First off to be clear you said it was discovered using the scotch tape method. I mean it like literally and you tell me but I mean literally they put like scotch tape I don't know whether it was on um graphite or not but just you know ripped it off and were like oh we think we just got you know a layer of this and that's graphine. Is that pretty much how it was proven >> more or less? I don't know how many times they had to do that over and over probably sticking tape together to try to isolate that one atomic layer but they did eventually prove it quite literally with scotch tape. >> Wow. That's just that's crazy. Okay. So, it it's we've we've confirmed it existed. What that's a little over 20 years ago >> and maybe people have been reading about it for a couple years. Um, but it's something that we, you know, right now it's just kind of theoretical, right? I mean, there's there's I I haven't seen at least anything that says, you know, new and improved with graphine. Um, to the person who's listening to this conversation, Kirsten, saying, "I mean, this just sounds way too good to be true. I mean, this thing just seems to do everything and it's, you know, super low cost to produce and stuff." What would you say to them? H how would you actually say, "Look, trust me, this is actually it's really real and it's really going to make your life better." >> I mean, I think lots of new technologies can come across like that. If we could imagine having what we had have now decades ago, it would have seemed impossible as well. I think, you know, graphine really is on the bleeding edge. And I think that most of what we're going to uncover, we can't exactly fathom now. We're really just starting to learn how to use it. But there are products that already have graphine. I do think that it is in industry more than what people realize. And I think that um you know they say within the industry it's really the next two years that this is going to fully take off. >> Okay. And that was my next question for you is like like when when will we kind of see the benefits of this? Whether we even know it's graphine or not but we're just like oh my god, you know I'm making this up like my car's tires just got so much. I'm never having to replace my tires anymore. They're so much stronger than the old version or like when will we actually know we're living in a graphine era? I mean, I think it's going to begin in the next two years. I would say by 2030, we're going to have a solid amount of products that people will have heard of graphine. It will be in a lot of different materials and I think that's when it's going to be very exciting. >> Okay. Um, so I mentioned earlier your the stock performance of your company and and folks, you know, this not an official endorsement and past performance is no guarantee of future performance and all that stuff. Um but clearly uh the market has woken up to the potential here. Um I guess first question is is why do you think that the stock performance has been so dramatic in the past year? Is it literally just an an appreciation by Wall Street that graphine's important and they're pouring into all sorts of companies or is there something specific that happened with hydrograph? Um what's driving this this latest interest? I I do think it's quite specific to hydrograph and I I really believe it is um you know the the beauty of the patents that we have. It's an incredibly simple method. It's scalable. We have global coverage and um we have provably the best performance by a long shot in the industry. And I think that um we probably hadn't socialized the company enough in previous years. And now that we've taken that more seriously and are, you know, attending conferences, um, things exactly like what you and I are doing podcast like this, >> it all it all really helps. And I think, you know, we've picked up a lot of, um, very, very supportive shareholders over the past year, and all of that has really helped create something that um, I think we deserve the attention. I think that this company really is going to to change a lot. And to speak a little bit more about some of the recent attention, we've been working with the Army and the Navy for about two years and the Army has expressed interest in building an innovation hub in Austin and to our knowledge, we're the only graphine company that's really made the cut. So they've been very selective. We believe it will be called the Graphine Innovation Consoria and I believe that we will be there with other defense companies, other battery producers potentially. So as we receive more information from the military, we will of course update the market. But all very very good signs uh for us. >> Okay. And um I mean it sounds like you're you're projecting this is going to be like a lot of transformative um technological transitions where they they generally started in the military, you know, whether it's the internet or wireless communications or you know I all the research that went into now sending rockets to the moon and all that stuff. So this is seems like it's just another transformation in that similar chain. Correct. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. Okay. Um so let's see here. Uh there are um you know there's there's I'm just trying to think of the ways in which we will experience this in the world and and I know to a certain extent it's a little bit like well we're still figuring out what this wonder thing can do and there's probably lots of applications or solutions we can't even imagine just yet. But, you know, we we live in a just taking America for a moment, you know, we live in a country that um has an aging infrastructure, right? So, we have all sorts of roads and bridges uh whatnot that are dams that are going to need to be rebuilt going forward. presumably if they are, you know, if they're rebuilt or renovated with graphine related uh technology, um, you know, we may get a much longer shelf life out of the next generation of things that we're building. Um, I know we want to, you know, dramatically increase our electricity production as a country. Um, and we want to electrify, you know, the transportation grid if possible and all sorts of things. I mean, I can just sort of see all these things that graphine, if it does what what you're purporting it could do. Um, you know, we're going to we're going to see this as something that will sort of both accelerate uh the the roll out of all this, but also give us better of everything, right? Like it'll it'll perform better, but it'll last better. um you know some if somebody has an electric car um new batteries that are made you know one of the one of the concerns about owning an electric car is well when the battery you know gets used up um I got to you know if if I want to go to replace the battery it might cost as much as just buying a new car that's that's today's issue I'm assuming you might be able to graph might be able to extend the battery life you know of a car battery by years decades etc all of a sudden making that kind of a non-issue. I mean, there's just I'm thinking through all this in real time, but like am I am I somewhat accurately describing what you think graphine is bringing to the the future for us both as individual consumers, but also, you know, a nation at large? >> No, absolutely. And I think it's it's time and money, right? A lot of the really high-tech, a lot of very exciting um new applications with graphine will take more time to really work out the process and the research behind it, but we are already on our way there. And I think there's going to be significant improvements um even with you know automobile batteries really in the near future. >> Okay. And even with the automobile I mean again I'm yeah the tires are going to be better as we said earlier but the battery might be better if it's a an electrical or if it's a hybrid. Um, but presumably might the chassis be lighter but also stronger if if graphine can be included into the the manufacturing process for the actual, you know, paneling and and uh uh you know metals that we're putting into the car. >> Absolutely possible. >> Yeah. I mean, again, like I said, I'm just sort of thinking through this in real time, but like you know, you can make airplanes, right? Well, make them make them lighter but stronger. And you know, all of a sudden they're a lot more fuel efficient, right? Um, you know, sending things up into space. Again, thinking big here. You know, you build a rocket out of something that's got a lot of graphine in it. Well, you know, all of a sudden you can get a much bigger payload into space for the same amount of fuel. >> Completely. >> All right. So, I'm not being crazy here with my my brain leaping to all this. >> Some of these some of these will take more research, but it it is absolutely possible. >> Okay. All right. Well, you kind of, you know, really expanded my thinking here and it's super exciting and super interesting. Um, and I'm I'm really hopeful that your company and all the graphy and other companies out there, you know, help accelerate us to this new really cool future. Um, I guess first on the just the technology itself or its applications, is there anything else that's worth putting on, you know, the average viewer's radar screen right now about it that I just haven't thought to ask you? in terms of our technology, >> terms of your technology, just just the applications of graphine or things to know about it. >> Um, you know, I think I think we've covered most, I guess, just kind of as a an update on where we are. I mentioned the graphine innovation consorcia um should be built in 2027. We're opening a headquarters here in Austin in about two weeks and then a large scale production facility just outside of Houston. So we will um as mentioned a lot of our interest is in defense right now but we work a lot with composites coatings and we will be rapidly expanding the applications that we're pursuing. I think I mentioned that we're going to be looking much more into um metals. We will be looking at um you know additional bio sensors and so it's kind of challenging in a company like this because you can do everything but that that means that you need to be much more selective really when you're getting started. But as soon as we see revenue, we'll be able to fund um so many more projects that are going to be u much more highly engineered. >> All right. Well, for folks that would like to learn more about uh Hydrograph um and invest in it. Um tell them where to go and obviously tell them what the ticker for your company is. >> Of course. So we are hydrograph.com. We are on the CSE. Our ticker is HG, but close to May, we will be uplisting to NASDAQ. So, we will also be releasing more information on that change. >> All right, great. Uh, and Kirstston, when I edit this, I'll put the um URL and the ticker up on the screen so folks know exactly where to go. Um, well, Kirsten, this has been super fascinating. Um, I very much appreciate everybody who put both Graphine and your company and you on my radar. And let's just say you've got an open invitation here to when there's um you know any potential really big meaningful milestones in terms of what's happening with graphine um or what's happening with your company, come back on the channel here and we'll have another one of these conversations. >> Sure. Would love to. Thank you. >> All right. Oh, thank you very much everybody else. Thanks so much for watching.