16/07/2026
This week, International Graphite's Industrial Chemist, Kathy Miller, and Collie Operations Manager, Josh Hearse, welcomed students from the WA Mining Club's Get Into Mining camp to our Collie R&D Facility.
It was a great opportunity to showcase downstream graphite processing, talk about careers in critical minerals, and answer plenty of thoughtful questions from some very engaged future industry professionals.
One question sparked a lively engineering discussion...
"How many hamsters would it take to power the process plant?"
Rather than guessing, Josh did what good engineers do best and ran the numbers.
The verdict?
One 100 kVA generator requires:
🐹 200,000 hamsters running at any one time.
🐹 Around 800,000 in the workforce to cover fatigue, shift changes, annual leave and the occasional bout of unplanned wheel maintenance.
Safe to say our current power supply remains the more practical option.
A big thank you to the Western Australian Mining Club for visiting. We enjoyed sharing what we're building in Collie and hope we inspired a few future engineers, scientists and critical minerals professionals along the way.