Battery Metals

Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are working to increase the conductivity of aluminum, making it economically competitive with copper.

In the scientists’ view, this work opens the door to experiments that, if fully realized, could lead to an ultra-conductive aluminum alternative to copper that would be useful in markets beyond transmission lines, revolutionizing vehicles, electronics, and the power grid.

“What if you could make aluminum more conductive—even 80% or 90% as conductive as copper? You could replace copper and that would make a massive difference because more conductive aluminum is lighter, cheaper, and more abundant,” Keerti Kappagantula, PNNL materials scientist and co-author of the research, said in the media statement.

“That’s the big picture problem that we’re trying to solve.”

Kappagantula pointed out that this research came to be as he and his team became aware that copper demand is fast outpacing its current availability, particularly as the EV revolution takes off.

Knowing that aluminum is just one-third the price and weight of copper but that it is only about 60% as conductive, they decided to do something to increase the metal’s conductivity.

“Conductivity is key because a lighter weight wire with equivalent conduction can be used to design lighter motors and other electrical components, so your vehicle can potentially go longer distances,” Kappagantula said. “Everything from a car’s electronics to energy generation to transmitting that energy to your home via the grid to charge your car’s battery—anything that runs on electricity—it can all become more efficient.”

Altering metals’ structure

According to the scientist, for years, it was believed that metals couldn’t be made more conductive. However, it is now known that by altering their structure and introducing the right additives, it is possible to influence metals’ properties.

To begin figuring out just how much aluminum conductivity could be increased, Kappangantula and post-doctoral scholar Aditya Nittala teamed up with David Drabold and Kashi Subedi of Ohio University to identify the effects of temperature and structural defects in aluminum conductivity and develop an atom-by-atom recipe to increase its conductivity.

This type of molecular simulation had never been done for metals before, so the researchers looked at semiconductors for inspiration as previous research had successfully simulated conductivity in these silicon-based materials and some metal oxides.

The team then adapted these concepts to work with aluminum and simulated what would happen to the metal’s conductivity if individual atoms in its structure were removed or rearranged. These tiny changes added up to significant gains in total conductivity.

With a theoretical recipe to alter metal conductivity now clear, the researchers plan to see how much they can increase the conductivity of aluminum in the laboratory to match theory with experimental results. They are also exploring the possibility of increasing the conductivity of other metals using the same simulations.

Tesla Inc. is likely to lose its position as the dominant electric-vehicle maker in the US to GM or Ford by 2025 as competitors release a barrage of 135 new electric vehicles, Bank of America analyst John Murphy said in his annual Car Wars forecast.

Elon Musk’s company will still be growing as EV sales continue to soar, but its share of the market will fall to about 11% in 2025 from over 70% today, Murphy wrote. Tesla has loyal fans, but the company won’t be able to keep up with the pace of new models coming from General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and several foreign automakers.

“Elon has had a vacuum for the last 10 years in which to operate, where there hasn’t been much competition,” Murphy said. “That vacuum is now being filled in a massive way in the next four years by very good product, not by econobox, toaster-box EVs, but real good product.”

Annual US sales of EVs could grow eightfold to more than 3.2 million by 2025 from about 400,000 last year, which gives every company launching new models — including Tesla — a crack at more sales. Murphy sees GM and Ford leading the market, with each garnering about 15% share.

GM plans to launch 17 new EV models in the US market from 2023 to 2026, Murphy said, while Ford will have six. Volkswagen AG will have 11 during that span, and the Korean duo of Hyundai and Kia will have 13. They could all be winners and steal share from Tesla, which has announced plans for the Cybertruck, a semi and the roadster.

Tesla also will be expanding in China and Europe, but it won’t be the hot-growth story it has been, Murphy said.

Five or 10 years from now, Murphy said, people will look back and ask why “Tesla didn’t take greater advantage of the free money it could have gotten, raise much more, open capacity faster, grow much faster, and shut the door.”

(By David Welch and Gabrielle Coppola)

Micromobility provider Tier Mobility and Remondis have agreed to cooperate on recycling lithium-ion batteries on a large scale. As a result, Remondis will be responsible for recycling the batteries from over 160,000 e-kick-scooters, e-bikes and e-mopeds from the current Tier fleet in 16 European countries.

Batteries that have reached the end of their useful life will thus be properly recycled and the raw materials they contain will be returned to the respective cycles as efficiently as possible.

“Proper recycling of lithium-ion batteries is crucial to reduce the environmental impact of our services, while making an important contribution to securing the future availability of raw materials,” says Ailin Huang, Head of Sustainability at Tier Mobility. “The CO2 savings and substitution of primary resources greatly protect the environment and climate and alleviate the industry’s procurement pressure,” adds Lukas Wiedenmann, Key Account Manager at Remondis.

The partnership builds on an existing history between the two companies. Remondis from Lünen, Germany, has already been working with Tier since 2021 in the recycling of lithium-ion batteries. However, with the expansion into new markets such as Belgium, Spain, Israel and Croatia and the introduction of e-bikes in London, Berlin, Stockholm and Milan, both companies are now expanding their partnership further. To minimise the environmental impact and ecological footprint of shared micromobility, Tier and Remondis aim to return valuable precious metals to the raw material cycle. These include cobalt, nickel, manganese, but also plastics, aluminium and other electronic components.

The recycling of batteries is only to be carried out when repair is no longer possible or the service life cannot be extended with a second-life solution. In these cases, the company has already been working with Vertical Values for some time. Both Tier and Vertical Values have recently started working on reuing batteries before they are recycled.

As part of its commitment to sustainability, Tier has adopted the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a guiding framework and turned them into an agenda with clear goals for the company. “Recycling is part of the United Nations’ 12th Sustainable Development Goal: Sustainable Consumption and Production. Recycling our products is therefore a natural part of our efforts to drive real sustainability in the micromobility industry,” explains Ailin Huang.

The first 500MWh of a battery storage portfolio for SMC Global Power, a wholly owned subsidiary of major Philippines holding company San Miguel Corporation, has been installed.

According to a report by newspaper Manilla Standard, the company announced it had reached the halfway point in its rollout of 1,000MW/1,000MWh of battery energy storage systems yesterday (30 June 2022).

The system will provide grid balancing services to electricity networks on islands in the Southeast Asian country, such as frequency response, reserve power and voltage regulation.

The Standard quoted San Miguel Corporation president Ramon Ang as having said installed capacity will reach 700MWh by the end of 2022 and all 31 facilities in the pipeline will be completed “within 12 months”.

Energy-Storage.news reached out to San Miguel Corporation – one of the Philippines’ largest privately-owned entities –  to enquire about the news and for further details but is yet to receive a reply.

What is known however is that installation of about 80MW/80MWh of the first battery energy storage systems (BESS) in the portfolio was completed and announced last June.

A 20MW/20MWh system delivered by global system integrator Fluence was then entered into commercial operations at the beginning of this year. Fluence supplied, installed and commissioned the system on a turnkey engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract basis.

Fluence had revealed it was contracted to deliver 470MW/470MWh of the initial buildout, which SMC said it was investing around US$1 billion into, while other companies known to be working on projects include Wärtsilä and ABB.

SMC: Total progress at 61% as of end of May

SMC has progressed project development quickly. Having been the first company to deploy a large-scale BESS of 10MW/10MWh in the country, at the site of a coal plant it owns, it said in April 2021 that it aimed to build projects in the new portfolio “simultaneously”.

In a prospectus filed with the Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) at the end of May this year, SMC Global Power noted that its diversified energy portfolio stood at 4,734MW, comprising assets including natural gas, coal, renewable energy and battery energy storage systems.

This is equal to 19% of capacity on the National Grid, 26% of capacity on the grid of the island of Luzon and 7% of capacity on Mindanao’s grid.

SMC noted that the 20MW Masinloc BESS project which Fluence completed entered into a five-year ancillary services agreement with National Grid Corporation from January. It is expected that similar contracts will be entered into over the coming months for the next projects.

As of the end of April, nearly all of the equipment required for the 1,000MW portfolio had been delivered to project sites, including 860MWh of battery modules and 690MWh of inverters. While the amount of energy capacity installed has reached 500MWh, actual project completion for the portfolio was at about 61% by that time, the company said in its SEC-filed prospectus.

SMC said four sites totalling 80MWh had been fully completed, 150MWh was undergoing testing and commissioning and eight more sites totalling 260MWh would be entering testing and commissioning during May.

Another interesting point disclosed to the SEC is that SMC entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with battery manufacturer Samsung SDI in January 2020. This gave the power company preferred customer status, and tied Samsung SDI into performance guarantees, competitive pricing, warranties and other deal terms.

SMC Global Power listed gaining market share for ancillary services “and renewable energy initiatives” through battery energy storage systems among its principal business strategies. It is actively seeking opportunities to develop battery systems for applications that include peak shaving, microgrids, power quality management, black start of power plants and grids, energy aggregation, reactive power support and other ancillary services.

This is along with renewable energy integration applications, with the company building hundreds of megawatts of solar PV in the Philippines, which is going through an ongoing period of growing demand for electricity amid calls to reduce its reliance on coal-fired generation.

Other power generation companies in the country are also developing standalone battery storage, while the Philippines first solar-plus-storage hybrid plant came online this year. A recently proposed giga-hybrid project could pair between 2,500MW and 3,500MW of solar PV with between 4,000MWh and 4,500MWh of BESS, Prime Infrastructure Holdings, the company behind it, said.

Last month, Energy-Storage.news reported that the Philippines Department of Energy had issued developers of 529MW /829MWh battery projects with clearance to undertake grid impact studies for their proposals.

A patented new process developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) may make possible the increased production of lithium and rare earth elements (REEs) in the United States. Lithium, a naturally occurring metal, makes up only 0.0007 percent of the Earth’s crust, according to the Jefferson Lab; it is only found locked up in minerals and salts. However, since the early 1990s, lithium has been in hot demand, as it has been used in rechargeable batteries. REEs are also in demand for a variety of economic, energy, and defense applications.

A domestic source would insulate the United States from disruptions in global trade of REEs, NETL shared in a news release. And, because the United States has just one lithium mine in Nevada, additional domestic sources could also help address increasing lithium demand.

NETL’s invention uses a unique CO2 injection technique to produce lithium carbonate ‘directly’ in a brine, explained Jinichiro Nakano, one of the NETL co-inventors, in the news statement. “The technology is the next generation of direct lithium extraction process that does not require adsorbents, absorbents, and membranes. It eliminates the need for freshwater, solid chemicals, acids, and a mineralization facility to produce lithium minerals. CO2 may be mixed into a brine in such a way that mineralization of a brine occurs almost instantly even under ambient conditions. This make possible accelerated recovery of critical materials from brines with a relatively small footprint and in an environmentally benign fashion.”

Natural brines, which consist of underground water, water from salt lakes, or seawater, exhibit lithium as well as significant concentrations of valuable minerals such as REEs and critical metals. Produced water is a byproduct of oil or gas extraction from rocks that contain water. It also results from hydraulic fracturing when fracturing fluid returns to the surface. Produced water can also be a source for lithium and REEs.

NETL’s process is currently being evaluated by One World Lithium Inc. for use on naturally occurring brines with the exception of sea water and geothermal brines, through a non-exclusive research and evaluation license.

NETL co-inventor Anna Nakano added that the new process has other advantages. “The CO2 used in the process is readily available in the air,” she said. “It can also be sourced from industrial waste streams. Because it is portable enough to facilitate full operation at the source of brine, it eliminates the hundreds of millions of dollars for capital investment that would otherwise be required in current processes.”

Nakano said the innovation represents a way to build sustainable domestic supply chains for lithium and REEs. “In addition to natural brines and produced water, the process could extract lithium, REEs and other critical materials from sea water,” he said. “It can be used as a tool for carbon sequestration and to clean contaminated water.”