Battery Metals

Our society is becoming more lithium-ion battery dependent — electric cars, scooters and solar-powered homes. But there are dangers involved when handling these blocks of power.

Tuesday morning, the battery of a scooter inside a Bethesda apartment overheated and caught fire. As a result, a family has been displaced and one man suffered minor burns.

If a lithium-ion battery pack fails, it will burst into flames and can cause widespread damage.

These batteries are extremely sensitive to high temperatures and inherently flammable. Heat causes these battery packs to degrade much faster.

Pete Piringer with Montgomery County Fire and Rescue says this year they have had about a dozen fires related to a failing lithium-ion battery, everything from hoverboards to electric cars in garages.

If the lithium-ion battery changes color or shape, gets extremely hot starts making noises or even starts to smell, those are all signs that it is overheating — Try moving the device away from flammable materials and unplugging it.

If you’re in an electric vehicle, pull over and get out. Never attempt to extinguish lithium battery fires yourself.

Lithium-ion batteries should be taken to separate electronic recycling drop-off sites or household hazardous waste collection events.

To prevent fires, tape battery terminals and place each lithium-ion battery in a separate plastic bag.

“You can’t throw them in the trash, there is a way to get rid of them. In Montgomery County, they do collect them and I know that most jurisdictions do collect those but do follow the manufacturers’ instructions. There are some pretty good guidelines but they have to be disposed of differently and separately,” said Piringer.

The Environmental Protection Agency says evidence shows about 300 fires across 28 states since 2013 caused by lithium metal or rechargeable lithium batteries.

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration has released safety guidelines. When lithium batteries fail to operate safely or are damaged, they may present a fire and/or explosion hazard. Damage from improper use, storage, or charging may also cause lithium batteries to fail. Testing batteries, chargers, and associated equipment in accordance with an appropriate test standard certification and product recalls, help identify defects in design, manufacturing, and material quality.

“We don’t recommend that you charge these things overnight. It’s just like cooking on the stove, you have to watch what you’re doing, pay attention to the charging. So it’s not a good idea to charge them overnight,” added Piringer.

OTTAWA, April 4 (Reuters) – Canada’s federal budget will include an investment of at least C$2 billion ($1.6 billion) for a strategy to accelerate the production and processing of critical minerals needed for the electric vehicle (EV) battery supply chain, two senior government sources said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, which is due to release its budget on Thursday, will make the investment to ramp up the extraction of processing of critical minerals including nickel, lithium, cobalt and magnesium, said the sources who are familiar with the matter but were not authorized to speak on the record.

The investment could be spread over more than one year, but the sources declined to comment on the time frame.

Canada last month announced financial support for building two facilities that will make battery materials for electric vehicles, and one battery gigafactory, but no agreements have yet been announced for mineral extraction or refining.

“There are some particular projects that we are looking at and working on at the present time,” Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said in a recent telephone interview with Reuters.

All the potential projects, “whether they’re extraction or processing, need to be accelerated significantly, and that’s what the critical mineral strategy will be about,” he added.

Canada’s finance ministry declined to confirm whether the investment would be in the budget that will be presented by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in the House of Commons.

“Canada has an abundance of valuable critical mineral deposits, and with the right investments, this sector can create thousands of new good jobs, grow our economy, and make Canada a vital part of the growing global critical minerals industry,” said Adrienne Vaupshas, press secretary for Freeland.

There are “many active conversations” between the Canadian government and companies “on the need to accelerate and scale up the production of raw materials used in EV batteries,” one of the sources said.

Canada, which is home to a large mining sector, has a multi-billion-dollar fund set up to invest in green technologies and is trying to woo companies involved in all levels of the EV supply chain to safeguard the future of its manufacturing heartland in Ontario as the world seeks to cut carbon emissions.

Ontario is geographically close to U.S.-based automakers in Michigan and Ohio, and General Motors Co (GM.N), Ford Motor Co (F.N) and Stellantis NV (STLA.MI) have all announced plans to make electric vehicles at factories in the Canadian province.

MINERALS FROM MINING WASTE

Since it can take many years – even a decade or more – to open new mines, Wilkinson said some of the projects being considered involve “tailings from existing mines from which you could extract critical minerals.”

“We’re looking at brines and oil sands, tailings ponds, and all of those things,” he said.

Brendan Marshall, the vice president of economic and northern affairs for the Mining Association of Canada, said this kind of project would require research.

“There needs to be research and development” to develop technologies that can identify and separate critical minerals “from the general waste stream,” Marshall said.

Canada’s critical mineral strategy will focus on, among other things, driving research, innovation and exploration, one of the sources said.

GM said on Monday that it was investing C$2 billion on two plants, including one that will produce an electric vehicle for commercial use in Canada. Last month, GM said it had partnered with South Korea’s POSCO Chemical (005490.KS) to build a facility to make battery materials in Quebec.

Scott Bell, the president and managing director of GM Canada, said last month that Canada’s abundance of nickel and other raw materials would be used to make cathode active material in the Canadian province, without elaborating.

“These companies are going to need those critical minerals that our country has, so we need to start aggressively ramping up the mining and processing required,” Canadian Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said in Vancouver last week.

Demand for minerals needed for batteries, including lithium and cobalt, could increase by almost 500% by 2050, the World Bank estimates. Currently Asia, and in particular China, dominates global production and processing of critical minerals, rare earths and rare metals used to make EVs.

Constantine Karayannopoulos, president and chief executive officer of Neo Performance Materials Inc(NEO.TO), a rare earths and rare metals processing company based in Toronto, said Canada and North America have a lot of catching up to do.

“We are behind the eight ball collectively in the West, behind China,” Karayannopoulos said in a telephone interview. “China is dominating this space … We need a lot of money (to build the supply chain) because we’re playing catch-up.”

($1 = 1.2517 Canadian dollars)

KYMCO Chairman Allan Ko recently shared new plans from the company’s electric vehicle developments, including the debut of the KYMCO Ionex Smart Streetlights system. Once employed, the system would see connected streetlights and traffic lights in smart cities tied into the brand’s swappable EV battery stations.

The Ionex brand is the Taiwan-based motorcycle maker KYMCO’s electric vehicle division. Last year the company decided to follow the Harley-Davidson route, intending to spin-off its EV division from its main two-wheeler manufacturing with an IPO.

The foundation of KYMCO’s Ionex line is currently built around its swappable battery packs and their battery swapping stations. The swappable batteries were first unveiled at the Paris Motor Show in 2018, where Electrek had a front row seat to the announcement.

The batteries are designed to allow riders of Ionex’s electric motorbikes to roll up, swap a battery and continue on their way.

Now the company is rolling out even more uses for its KYMCO batteries as an auxiliary power device for smart cities.

With the new KYMCO Ionex Smart Streetlights system, swappable battery base stations would be incorporated into connected streetlights and traffic lights, with a solar power generator at the top of the unit to recharge the batteries.

In the event of a power outage, the batteries in the station below could also send energy backwards, keeping the streetlights and traffic lights running.

As CEO Allan Ko explained:

“KYMCO has always been at the forefront of the next-generation transportation. We have dedicated ourselves to creating the most thoughtful customer experience of the electric era including empowering smart city for the future riders.

However, the availability of energy access and battery station is a continuous challenge for all EV makers, especially when acquiring land for power facility in cities where land is at a premium. With the Ionex Smart Streetlights system, a battery station has multiple functions with only limited space required. Therefore, we can provide a solution that mutually benefits the smart city operators and consumers.”

We recently witnessed a similar type of application of swappable battery stations used for backup power during a regional or nationwide power outage.

Early last month, KYMCO’s competitor Gogoro was able to keep its thousands of battery swap stations running when Taiwan was hit by a massive power outage that affect much of the country.

Millions of people were out of power for most of a day, with the power outage also closing down gas stations that couldn’t operate their pumps. But Gogoro’s stations, which can sustain themselves and continue operating for several days on their own reserve power, continued working. Throughout the power outage, riders were still able to swap batteries and stay mobile during the emergency.

Battery swap stations are exceedingly popular in Taiwan, where commuters already skew heavily towards two-wheeled transportation and e-scooters have made large inroads towards displacing conventional gasoline-powered motorcycles.

Battery swap stations already outnumber gas stations in Taipei, and will soon do so throughout the country.

Limited range is one of the most frequent criticisms of EVs. Although a 300-mile rating is becoming increasingly common for current electric cars, some fossil fuel models can go twice as far on a tank. But what if your BEV could do 900 miles on a single charge? German battery startup Theion is promising technology that could deliver this possibility as soon as 2024.

The key to Theion’s technology is sulfur, and in fact the company’s name is derived from the Greek for this yellow mineral. According to CEO Dr Ulrich Ehmes, it has the properties required to deliver a revolution in battery chemistry, with knock-on benefits in all the key areas for EVs. Co-founder and CTO Marek Slavik had been working on the technology for the best part of a decade, and Ehmes has recently arrived to make it a production reality.

As many EV haters on social media will tell you, EV batteries are full of rare earth minerals, which makes them expensive and ethically problematic to manufacture, particularly when sourcing cobalt from the Congo. Theion’s strategy is to base its battery technology on minerals that are far more abundant than those used in current Lithium-Ion cells, but that have similar potential for energy density.

Sulfur is the tenth most abundant element on Earth, and local sources are usually available in any chosen location in the world. “Existing battery technology uses nickel, manganese, and cobalt for the cathode,” says Ehmes. “It’s called NMC 811, because it has 80% nickel, 10% cobalt, 10% manganese. In our case, we replace this NMC 811 with sulfur. So we have no nickel, no manganese, no cobalt, and we replace the current collective folds of copper and aluminum withy graphene so we have also no aluminum and no copper in our cells either. The only things we have in our cells are lithium metal foil, sulfur, and carbon.” To make this technology work, the sulfur must be melted to form crystals, but this is only 112C (235F).

So what are the advantages of Theion’s radical shift in battery chemistry? Of course, you could make an EV go 900 miles with current battery technology. The problem would be how heavy that battery would be, and how much space they require. Current EVs do somewhere between 3 and 5 miles per kWh, although power consumption can be a lot more if you drive in a “spirited” fashion or in extreme temperatures. Let’s say 4 miles per kWh to be fair. Using this figure, you would need 225kWh to go 900 miles. Current Tesla Model 3 “2170” batteries have a density of 260Wh/kg, although the latest technology can hit 350Wh/kg. Assuming the latter, a 225kWh battery would weight 643kg, but with Tesla 2170 cells it would be 865kg. With a Tesla Model 3 Long Range weighing around 1,850kg, you can see why no current EVs are offering a 900-mile range.

Battery weight is derived from the “gravimetric density” the cells, but the other consideration is “volumetric density” – how much space the batteries take up. Tesla Model 3 2170 batteries reportedly have a volumetric density of 416kWh/liter. While weight is important, you also need to fit your batteries into a reasonable amount of space, so there is plenty left for passengers and cargo. Most current designs put the batteries in a “skateboard” design under the floor to maximize this space, but you still see a lot of EVs sitting higher than internal combustion equivalents to provide the necessary floor thickness.

When Tesla switched to LFP batteries in the standard Model 3 in Europe, it lost both gravimetric and volumetric density due to deficiencies in this technology compared to Lithium-Ion, but the Model 3’s battery box was designed to fit the larger batteries of the Long Range and Performance, so this base model could simply take up more of the battery box space. Tesla appears to have increased the battery size to provide the latest 305-mile WLTP range while sacrificing some of the acceleration due to the extra weight of LFP.

Ehmes claims Theion’s technology will radically increase both gravimetric and volumetric density, so that its batteries either take up less weight and space for the same capacity, or you can have much more capacity for the same weight.

Theion’s current Gen 1 technology is already at 500Wh/kg and 800Wh/liter – well above Tesla’s 2170 cells. But the Gen 2 technology is promising to raise this to 700Wh/kg and 1,000Wh/liter in 2023, followed by Gen 3 in 2024 that will deliver 1kWh/kg and 1,200Wh/l. Going back to our car with a 900-mile range, its battery would be just 225kg. This would be around 60kg less than the current battery in the Tesla Model 3 Long Range, which has a 374-mile WLTP rating, and would take around a third of the space. Theion’s Gen 4 battery, due in 2025, will have a slightly lower gravimetric density of 900Wh/kg, but a higher volumetric one of 1,500Wh/liter – so it would take just over a quarter of the space of a Tesla Model 3 Long Range battery. Theion is also promising 2,000 charge-discharge cycles for its Gen 3 and 4 technologies, which is above the 1,000-1,500 cycles of current Lithium-Ion cells.

Another important aspect is of course price, and Theion is promising amazing reductions here too. “Our price target is €30 per kilowatt hour in comparison to €90 per kilowatt hour today,” says Ehmes. This is because the materials Theion uses are cheaper, and so is the energy consumption. “Production energy is 90% less.” With batteries making up around a third of current EV costs, this reduction would easily push total car prices well below that of internal combustion vehicles. That current 225kWh pack for 900 miles would potentially be the same sort of price as a 75kWh one for 300 miles is today.

Unfortunately, Theion isn’t initially going to be delivering its technologies to the EV industry. “We’re currently talking to the space industry,” says Ehmes. “We will hand over the R&D surplus to the air taxi next. Then mobile devices like handhelds, laptops, mobile phones, and wearables.” But EVs are definitely on the roadmap for Theion, and production has been designed to scale up to the quantities required by electric cars.

Assuming this technology delivers as promised, it could remove one of the final barriers to EV adoption. A city car with a 300-mile range would have a battery weighing just 75kg and taking up just 50 liters of space. In comparison, a Tesla Model 3 Long Range battery delivering this range takes 180 liters. But if you equipped a car like the Tesla with Theion’s technology, it could easily go 900 miles or even more on a single charge with a battery the same size and weight as it currently has.

Of course, a 225kWh battery like this would take around 30 hours to replenish on a 7.4kW home charger, and probably over an hour to hit 80% even on the fastest public DC rapid chargers. But if you can go 900 miles on a charge, you may never need to use a public charger.

It’s worth remembering that, although both EVs and internal combustion fuel cars were invented around the same time (at the end of the 19th century), EVs have had far less time developing. The EV as we know it today has really only existed for a decade or so, whereas internal combustion has been incrementally improving for over 100 years. The EV is already smoother to drive, faster and cheaper to run than internal combustion. It clearly won’t be very many more years before technology such as Theion’s will mean EVs will go further between refueling stops, too.