Professor Yuta Nishina, from Okayama University, spent the week helping to establish a facility to produce graphene and graphene oxide, at Armidale's University of New England (UNE).

Backed by the UNE, Vesi Water Group, plans to use the unique carbon material as the raw material for nanotechnology that would suck water out of the air.

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Just an atom wide, so thin it's been described as "two dimensional", graphene has a wide range of uses, everything from electronic and energy production and storage to medicine. It can be used to charge huge batteries in minutes, or draw water from the air.

Vesi managing director Llewlyn Owens said the material would be so useful it would be like the "rubber but of the 21st century".

Because it can be used to "tailor-make" materials for specific purposes, it's extraordinarily useful.

"It has so many applications," he said.

"It won the Nobel Prize in 2010. And the applications are fundamentally changing material science."

Professor Nishina developed the "Nishina process", a electro-chemical process similar to electrolysis, a more efficient, and safer, way to produce both materials.

"It's a clean, sustainable process," Mr Owens said.

"It's the only one of its kind that we know of."

Mr Owens said the facility would be a "research centre", proving the technology can be produced at scale and would bring all sorts of high-tech jobs to the region.

The business plans to produce about 1700 kilograms a year, within two years.

That would make it Australia's only large production facility, and one of the largest in the world.

It'd be enough for 200 water filters in one year.

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The material retails for about $200 a gram on the world market.

Vesi's patented cutting-edge technology would use renewable energy to harvest more than 200 litres of clean water per day from thin air.

The company is currently developing the technology, and aims to have a demonstration project within a year.

Professor Nishina said Japan has virtually no problems with water, so he travelled to Australia in order to find a place where the technology would be needed.

He said the new water-gathering technology could first solve all sorts of water contamination or water supply problems.

The discovery of graphene earned the 2010 Nobel Prize.

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