How Graphene is Changing the World … Right Now

What if your phone battery charged in seconds instead of hours? What if buildings could cut their carbon emissions in half? What if medical sensors could detect diseases years earlier than they do today? Graphene was supposed to deliver on all of those and more. Since 2004, researchers called it a wonder material. It would revolutionize everything. 20 years later, most of those promises fell flat. Graphene earned a reputation of vaporware as those promises vanished into vapor. No matter how many years have passed, the big breakthroughs in graphene were always just a few years away from changing the world. But something's different now. Graphene supercapacitors are powering AI data centers. Graphene-enhanced concrete is being poured at industrial sites. Medical sensors using graphene are hitting the market. The trickle is starting to turn into a flood. So what changed? How did graphene go from a miracle material to overhyped curiosity to actually delivering results? And more importantly, how will these breakthroughs actually affect you? I'm Matt Ferrell. Welcome to Undecided. This video is brought to you by Ground News. This is graphene. But so is this. And this. But first, let me back up for a moment. You might already know about graphene, but what exactly is it in the first place? Graphene was first isolated in 2004. It's a single layer of carbon atoms that are arranged in a flat, hexagonal pattern … just one atom thick. That combination gives graphene incredible properties. Hexagons are tough. Carbon can be tough too. Just think about carbon fiber or diamonds. Put them together and you get something 200 times stronger than steel, all while being only one atom thick. And here's another trick. Carbon is very conductive in the right arrangements. Graphite can even beat copper under certain conditions. These hexagonal lattices work like express highways for electrons. Usually defects in a material act like potholes that create a traffic jam because they slow electrons down. Graphene's structure gives electrons a clean path, and the result is superb electrical and thermal conductivity. It gets weirder though. Graphene stays flexible despite being so strong. Even stranger, you can make it from regular graphite. Just grab some scotch tape and a pencil, and you could technically make graphene at your desk right now. Of course, making useful amounts of high quality graphene is much trickier, and we'll get to that later. Now, let's look at how graphene is already changing industries. Paragraph claims to be the first company mass producing graphene-based electronic sensors. They're based in the UK and make Graphene Field Effect Transistors, or GFETs. These are basically just souped up versions of the regular FETs that you'll find in tons of devices. Which begs the question, if it ain't broke, why add graphene? Graphene makes better sensors for a few reasons. It's cheap, but we'll get to more of that later. It's tough, and it lasts longer than similar sensors. That electrical conductivity we talked about earlier makes for higher efficiency and less heat loss. Plus, graphene has some quarks that really shine here. You can easily tune its optical characteristics. That means you can tailor it for very specific jobs. One material, lots of different sensor types. And because it's only one atom thick, miniaturization is a breeze. It's perfect for things like endoscopy and biosensors. Here's where it gets really interesting. Graphene has a special relationship with something called the quantum hall effect. Stay with me here. Gonna get a little heady here for a second. The hall effect lets us move electrons in fast, predictable patterns, as long as they're moving in a current and a magnetic field. Apply this to bulk material and the electrons bunch up on one side, which creates a transverse voltage, also known as the Hall Voltage. Here's the quantum part. Take that same material and cool it down to 1°K, that's about negative 457°F. That's where things get really weird. The voltage doesn't scale smoothly anymore. You get distinct jumps and flat plateaus. The extreme cold stops atoms from vibrating as much, and this gives electrons time to cooperate with each other. While it creates some neat effects, extreme cold has its problems as well. Keeping things at 1°K is expensive and energy intensive. That's where graphene comes in because it can tap into this effect at room temperature. These voltage plateaus give graphene sensors incredible precision when compared to other sensors. For medical applications, this mix of sensitivity and certainty could save lives. Paragraph isn't limiting themselves to medical sensors though. They're not even selling finished sensors. Instead, they build the main sensing surface. They grow graphene on a sapphire base and add contacts with a gate electrode. Then customers add whatever receptor they need. Same canvas, different sensors. The result? Paragraph has a potassium ion sensor for healthcare, heavy metal sensors for agricultural runoff, gas sensors for hydrogen industries, and pH sensors for everything from gene therapy to food processing. But let's talk about optical microchips. 2D Photonics is working on them with one of its subsidiaries, CamGraphic, which spun out of the University of Cambridge. Over in Italy, they're about to mass-produce optical microchips enhanced with graphene. So what is an optical microchip? It's a specialized circuit that uses light instead of electrical signals to process data. These chips convert electrical signals into optical signals and back again. They pair well with fiber optics, which are getting more and more popular. You can probably guess how graphene helps here. We already talked about a graphene sensor that can detect light, so the same principles apply here. Optical microchips are extremely fast. I can't find specific performance numbers for 2D Photonics chips, but their German competitor Black Semiconductor claims its graphene chips hit 10 petabits per second. Petabit is a quadrillion bits. That's 1,000 terabits. It's absurdly fast. CamGraphic says its chips do all of this while using less energy and costing less. Remember graphene's thermal conductivity? It passively dissipates heat, so no active cooling is needed. Think about data centers for a second, because cooling is a massive cost. These chips could reduce cooling energy by up to 80%. With AI data centers exploding and jacking up our energy costs, anything that saves power and water matters. There's another bonus. Graphene's durability means these chips work in a much wider temperature range than standard chips. However, these optical microchips are not on store shelves just yet, but 2D Photonics is building a pilot plant outside of Milan. Once it's complete, they claim they can produce 200mm wide graphene-enhanced chips at scale. The cost would compete with standard silicon chips. There's no timeline yet, and jumping to commercialization is always the hardest part. That said, 2D Photonics secured £25 million, or about $32.6 million in funding from backers like Italy's Sovereign Wealth Fund, Sony, and the NATO Innovation Fund. But it's not just about sensors. Graphene is already boosting energy storage systems. But before I get to that though, let me show you something about how we get the information on these tech advances. Depending on where you read about solar or energy storage innovations, they're either revolutionary breakthroughs that will transform energy, or just another overhyped green tech bubble. When stories mix cutting-edge science, billion-dollar investments, and climate claims, how do you know if you're getting the full picture? That's where today's sponsor, Ground News, comes in. Created by a former NASA engineer, Ground News pulls from over 50,000 sources and breaks down political bias, credibility, ownership, and even financial incentives behind the coverage. A great example? Take any major story about renewable energy policy, like this one about President Trump stripping renewable energy from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory name. With one click, I can see a summary, political bias, ownership details, and a factuality breakdown for every outlet that's covering it. The center leading source keeps it straightforward, but highlights what changed. The left-leaning headline focuses on sadness and emotion over this change. Meanwhile, one right-leaning source just says the name changed with no hint as to why. Same story, three completely different narratives. If you're watching my channel, you probably like digging deeper into the science and technology behind these stories. Ground News helps you compare coverage, spot bias, and catch what others might have missed. I especially like the blind spot feed. It shows stories underreported by one side of the spectrum. It's helped me recognize my own blind spots and understand the nuance behind the headlines. For a limited time, you can get the same exact plan I used for nearly half off. Just head to ground.news slash undecided or scan the QR code to save 40% off their Vantage plan. Thanks to Ground News and to all of you for supporting the channel. Now let's get back to how graphene is impacting the energy storage industry. Graphene's electrical and thermal properties make it perfect for batteries and capacitors. We've covered companies like Skeleton Technologies before and their graphene energy storage devices are already on the market, but let's quickly recap how they work at a high level. For batteries, you can add graphene to a lithium battery's anode. The enhanced conductivity and surface area make the anode better at moving charge around. Capacitors are different for batteries because batteries store energy chemically. Batteries are optimized for a higher energy storage instead of extremely high peak power and ultra-fast cycling. Capacitors store energy electrostatically, kind of like rubbing your hair on a balloon. They use two electrically charged plates, one positive and one negative. Unlike batteries, capacitors are optimized for very fast charge and discharge, but with lower storage capacity. Supercapacitors are a hybrid. They use the charged plates of a capacitor, but also use electrodes and a liquid electrolyte like batteries. And those electrodes get covered in a porous conductive material, like carbon, which boosts performance. So you can probably see where I'm going with this. Because graphene is conductive and thin, it's often suggested as a carbon replacement in supercapacitors. Surface area limits capacitance. More surface area means better charge storage. And Skeleton Technologies takes this further. They've patented something they call curved graphene. It's a specialized form with a crumpled shape, so think of a ruffled potato chip. The wavy geometry increases usable surface area compared to flat graphene, which enables even higher performance. They claim 1 million charge cycles. Our earlier video covered their superbatteries, which bridge the gap between batteries and supercapacitors using curved graphene. And like I already mentioned, they're already on the market, but Skeleton Technologies isn't stopping there. In November 2025, they opened a superbattery factory in Varkaus, Finland. This is part of the EU's Just Transition Fund, or JTF, that's an investment program for climate-neutral economies. Skeleton and the EU see these batteries helping data centers become more efficient. They're also working on graphene GPUs. They call them G-GPUs. They claim the curved graphene reduces AI energy consumption by up to 45%, lowers power requirements by 44%, and boosts computing performance in flops by 40%. These claims are big. Big enough that I'm a little skeptical, because I haven't found third-party verification. But still, anything that reduces AI's resource consumption is, again, worth investigating. Graphene as we know it today was born at the University of Manchester, and their researchers are still innovating with it. The University of Manchester's Graphene Engineering Innovation Center is working on a graphene-enhanced concrete, and they call it concretene. I would have gone with graphcrete, but I'm not calling the shots. Using graphene to strengthen concrete makes sense, but that's not the main goal here. The real target is carbon emissions. Cement production contributes more than 7% of global CO2 emissions. So how does graphene help with that? To answer that, let's break down concrete. Not literally. The main ingredient in concrete is cement. The main ingredient in cement is something called clinker. Clinker is made by heating clay and limestone to between 900 and 1500 degrees Celsius, which causes the limestone to decompose into calcium oxide and a ton of carbon dioxide. It's a process called calcination. We could skip the CO2 heavy calcination phase by using plain limestone, but without calcination the concrete is too brittle to be useful. This is where graphene comes in. Add super tough graphene to uncalcinated cement and you overcome that fragility while cutting carbon emissions. GEIC claims concretene costs 15-20% less than regular concrete, which includes swapping materials, avoiding carbon taxes, and needing fewer repairs over a lifetime. Some of that math sounds a little hand-wavy to me, so this will merit closer inspection once the tech matures a little bit ... and the tech is maturing. GEIC has done several sidewalk pours. They recently teamed up with Cemex UK to produce concretene at scale. In April 2025, they poured 15 cubic meters of graphene and micronized lime-enhanced concrete at a North Umbrian wastewater treatment facility. This particular mix allegedly produced 49% less CO2 emissions per cubic meter than traditional concrete. If everything is as good and green as reported, we'll be seeing a lot more of this stuff. Big if though. Graphene is starting to live up to some of the hype from 2004, but we're still in the early phases for most applications. So what's the holdup? Well, we're still working out how to make graphene at scale. Every well-documented manufacturing method has drawbacks. There's an iron triangle here. You know the type where you have three options, but you can only pick two? You can make a lot of graphene, you can make it cheaply, or you can make it at a high quality. Only two. Take chemical vapor deposition, or CVD. It's a common production method because it makes a lot of graphene at a reasonable quality. CVD works by depositing a carbon-rich gas onto the metal substrate at high temperatures. The gas decomposes and forms graphene. Problem? The best substrates are pricey copper or nickel. Those high temperatures need tons of energy. Then you have to move the graphene from the substrate to the final device. That's risky because you can get cracks, wrinkles, and defects that ruin the graphene. These costs add up fast and can cancel out graphene's low material cost. It's not viable for commercial applications at scale. Mechanical exfoliation is another example. It's basically the scotch tape method, but refined. Use adhesives to physically peel graphene layers off of graphite. It produces decent quality graphene, but we haven't figured out how to scale it up. Then there's chemical reduction. This uses chemicals like hydrazine or glucose to strip oxygen from graphite. The positive is that it produces a ton of graphene at a reasonable price, but it messes with the hexagonal structure, so basically you end up with a lower quality graphene. So I can hear you asking, why does quality matter? Just pump out tons of it cheaply. Unfortunately, quality is critical for most applications that we've talked about today. Defects and impurities like the potholes in the electron superhighway we discussed earlier wreck the material's strength and conductivity. The thinner you want your graphene, the harder it gets to control these issues. And here's the frustrating part. The thicker your graphene, the fewer revolutionary qualities it keeps. I combine all of that with the general lack of consistency and the pricey production materials of techniques we mentioned earlier, and yeah, you can see how mistakes can be both common and expensive. There are proprietary techniques that work around this. They allegedly make enough graphene at suitable quality for commercial use. They seem to work. Companies have graphene products on the market, as we've covered in our videos on Skelton Technologies or the graphene perovskite solar panels. However, these production methods are proprietary. The details are hidden. It's understandable in a competitive market though. And speaking of which, the graphene market is expected to grow from $1.2 billion today to $3.58 billion in 2030. You can see why companies want to protect their edge. Still, it pays to be skeptical in emerging tech fields. I remain a little skeptical of huge claims hidden behind the proprietary tag. Normally, I like to place new tech on NASA's technological readiness level. It's a handy scale that NASA uses to assess a technology's maturity, but that's difficult here. We're talking about graphene, but that covers a dizzying array of technologies. Tech already on the market, companies like Skelton Technologies, that tops probably at a scale of 9. Stuff like Manchester's Concretene, with just a few successful demos, sits closer to maybe a 7. That means it's flight-qualified technology, ready for implementation into existing systems. The tech that hasn't hit those milestones is further back. So all these years later, is graphene finally living up to the 2004 hype? It's complicated. Graphene hasn't been implemented into every industry that it was supposed to revolutionize, but it is in commercially available tech right now. Graphene isn't enabling the far-out stuff the initial media buzz promised, but the fact that it's actually starting to appear in the world around us is a huge step forward. Many wonder materials are not as lucky. But what do you think? Is graphene still a much-do-about-nothing? Or are you excited about what's to come? Jump into the comments and let me know. You can also check out my extended cut of this video over on Patreon, where I go into an interesting use of graphene as deep-sea coating. It's really kind of wild. Speaking of that, these videos take a team to make. A team of humans. Real research, real interviews, real feedback from experts. There's no AI slop. If that matters to you, Patreon support helps a ton. And a big welcome to New Supporter Plus member Casey Cooley. The link's in the description if you'd like to join. But honestly, just watching like you are right now is absolutely awesome. So thank you. And check out my follow-up podcast, Still To Be Determined, where we'll keep this conversation going. Keep your mind open, stay curious, and I'll see you in the next one.