Battery Metals

France should start exploiting its own lithium resources to meet increased demand stemming from a shift away from fossil fuels, Barbara Pompili, the country’s environment minister, said in a video interview published on Thursday by business daily Les Echos.

France needs “long-term import contracts … but also to get lithium at home,” Pompili told the paper in the interview. “If we want to become a society which emits less greenhouse gases, we have to face the consequences: We need materials like lithium.”

Lithium, used in batteries for electric vehicles and smartphones, is seen as a key resource for the 21st century.

Electric cars are a key plank of European Union plans to cut emissions, and the bloc is trying to reduce reliance on battery supplies from Asia through projects with European-based carmakers and battery specialists. But almost all the critical minerals currently come from outside the continent, with China dominating the global supply chain.

Paris’s lithium supply also relies on French miner Eramet, which is seeking to ramp up production at a major deposit it owns in Argentina.

Les Echos on Thursday said France had detected domestic lithium deposits and first exploration efforts were ongoing in the eastern Alsace region.

“If it shows we have our own lithium at home, we must take the responsibility to extract it on our territory because we will do so under good conditions,” Pompili said.

Elsewhere in Europe, domestic mining efforts have faced protests. In Serbia, anti-mining protests have become a headache for the government, which in response to fierce public opposition revoked licences for Rio Tinto.

Accelerating sales of electric vehicles have pushed demand for lithium to multi-year highs, along with other critical commodities such as nickel and cobalt.

Analysts say a lack of investment in capacity due to sliding prices in the three years to 2021 means a supply deficit is likely to last for some years.

A US government pledge of US$2.9 billion support for the country’s battery manufacturing and recycling value chain is more like a band-aid than the “major surgery” required to fix the problem.

That’s the view of Adam Walters, a specialist renewable energy industry lawyer at Stoel Rives LLP. Energy-Storage.news reported earlier this week that the US Department of Energy (DOE) has unlocked the funding through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), aka the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal.

The DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy will support battery materials refining and production facilities, as well as battery cell and pack manufacturing and recycling.

The administration has correctly identified the problems facing US industries, which currently import nearly all of their battery materials, components and often finished products too from abroad, and largely from China, Walters said.

However according to the lawyer, the funding, in the form of loans, doesn’t solve those problems by addressing their root causes, nor is it enough in dollar terms.

From starting out working with utility-scale solar companies in 2008, Walters has increasingly focused on the battery energy storage space. Last year he contributed to an article for our quarterly journal, PV Tech Power, on the inherent financial risks that battery storage companies face in their supply chains.

“While the administration has identified the right problems when it comes to the need to spur both battery supply chain manufacturing and raw materials mining in the US, the problem with US manufacturing has always been, and still is, high labour costs relative to Asia,” Walters said in comments sent to Energy-Storage.news yesterday.

“Under US$3 billion in short-term government loans is not going to change that either, when in industry terms, this is a small amount of money — basically enough to build two or three moderate sized manufacturing facilities.”

‘Proper solution remains to be realised’

In his PV Tech Power article, published last August, Walters had said that in the solar PV industry, Chinese government subsidies had blown European and American manufacturers “out of the water” from around 2011 onwards, with “very few survivors of that”.

The dynamics aren’t quite the same for batteries, he said, but US competitiveness versus the Chinese battery value chain is nonetheless facing an uphill battle.

“Unfair Chinese subsidies play a role, as they did with the solar PV industry a decade ago, but it isn’t to the same magnitude and tariffs aren’t the solution either; the proper solution remains to be realised,” he said yesterday.

In the shorter term, the COVID-19 pandemic is creating current high shipping costs and delays for internationally sourced products, which would make US-made products more competitive. However, Walters said, this is unlikely to have more than a couple more years’ impact.

“By the time new government-subsidised plants are up and running, global shipping costs will be back down to near pre-pandemic levels.”

In the rush to bring battery manufacturing, materials processing and recycling onshore, the lawyer also said there is a possibility that companies applying for loans might be affiliates of Chinese, South Korean and Japanese top tier players seeking to add manufacturing in the US, rather than US companies.

While in Europe, literally hundreds of gigawatt-hours of battery manufacturing capacity have been committed to — from a combination of domestically and overseas-headquartered companies — the majority of new large-scale manufacturing plants in the US are in construction by the likes of South Korea’s SK Innovation and LG Energy Solution, although US startup KORE Power is building a gigafactory in Buckeye, Arizona.

FlexGen Power Systems has launched an electric vehicle charging solution combining its energy management system (EMS) platform and battery energy storage.

The North Carolina-based energy storage system integrator firm yesterday (16 February) announced the launch of Plug & Play FlexGen Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging Services.

It utilises its HybridOS 9.3 EMS platform and a containerised energy storage system (ESS) to optimise energy consumption for the charging network operator, and the platform integrates with on-site energy resources.

Benefits includes reducing peak demand to avoid charge rates from utilities by optimising usage. It also allows the user to by participate in regional power markets to get the best value for their energy.

Flexgen also claims to have expanded the EMS’ microgrid capabilities to allow it to continue supplying charging power regardless of what is happening on the power grid, like an outage, for example.

“EV’s are the future, and flexible, advanced, available EV charging is the most important step to realising that future. With Hybrid OS, FlexGen is perfectly positioned to meet the Biden Administration’s plan to provide onsite charging along the national highway system,” said Kelcy Pegler, CEO of FlexGen.

It comes six months after the firm secured US$150 million investment from asset manager Apollo Global Management. FlexGen started life over a decade ago specialising in microgrids for customers including the US Military, but has more recently become known for grid-connected energy storage systems. It has deployed numerous systems in Texas and started exploring niches in Midwestern US states.

Late last year it was awarded a 2.1GWh supply contract by smart energy developer Ameresco for battery projects in California and in January this year began the deployment of 40MWh of BESS at substations in North Carolina for electric cooperatives.

Hitachi Energy recently launched similar updates to its EV charging EMS-BESS combined platform which it said would provide similar beneficial functions, as covered by Energy-storage.news. Energy storage provider and software group Stem Inc, which publicly listed through a SPAC merger last year, said the convergence of EV charging infrastructure and solar/battery storage is increasingly gaining momentum.

Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. said on Tuesday it will triple its capital expenditure over the next three years to boost its output capacity of nickel and cathode materials used in batteries.

The Japanese miner and smelter plans to spend 494 billion yen ($4.3 billion) in capital expenditure, including investment and lending, in the next three years, up from 164 billion yen spent last three years.

“Our long-term goal to become a global leader in nonferrous metals remains unchanged,” President Akira Nozaki told a news conference on a new three-year business plan through March 2025.

“We also want to maintain a leading position in nickel-based cathode materials market by expanding production capacity,” Nozaki said.

Using some of the funds, SMM, which also makes electrical materials, plans to boost its monthly output capacity of cathode materials for rechargeable batteries used in electric vehicles to 10,000 tonnes by end-March 2028 and 15,000 tonnes by end-March 2031 from nearly 5,000 tonnes now to meet burgeoning demand.

SMM supplies the nickel-cobalt-aluminium (NCA) cathode materials used in Panasonic Corp’s lithium-ion battery that powers Tesla Inc’s Model 3 and Model X cars.

To secure nickel, SMM wants to make an investment decision on the Pomalaa nickel project in Indonesia “as early as possible,” Nozaki said. He also said the project aims to start production in late-2020s with a capacity of about 40,000 tonnes of mixed sulphide nickel. SMM’s local partner in the project is PT Vale Indonesia.

In Chile, the Quebrada Blanca 2 copper project is due to launch production later 2022. SMM’s copper output through its shareholding in the project is expected to reach 270,000 tonnes in the year to end-March 2025 from 230,000 tonnes this year.

The Cote gold project in Canada, in which SMM has a stake, is scheduled to begin production in the first half of 2023.

Despite the ambitious investment plan, SMM expects its net profit to fall to 118 billion yen in the year to end-March 2025, from an expected 248 billion yen for this year due to lower metals prices.

Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have developed a new material that improves the performance of solid-state sodium batteries, which are considered less dangerous and more durable than their lithium-ion counterparts.

Until now, one of the main issues playing against sodium batteries is the fact that sodium ions do not move easily in the liquid electrolyte of conventional batteries, making them less efficient than lithium. This is where the UNIGE development comes in.

By modifying the crystal structure of a material composed of carbon, boron and hydrogen (carbo hydridoborate), the Swiss researchers developed a more efficient solid electrolyte and also defined the ideal pressure to be applied to the battery for it to operate efficiently.

In a couple of papers published in the journals ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces and Advanced Materials Interfaces, the research team explains that because sodium is heavier than lithium, its ions also move less easily in the liquid electrolyte. This is why their solution implied designing a solid electrolyte that is also non-flammable and that deals with the performance shortcomings of already developed solid electrolytes that are composed of hydridoborates.

This is how they came up with the idea of creating sodium carbo-hydridoborate (NaCB11H12), an efficient material that is originally not conductive.

“By modifying the structure of its crystals, and more precisely the spatial arrangement of the atoms, we have succeeded in making it conductive, which makes it the most efficient means of transporting sodium ions currently available,” Radovan Cerny, co-author of the studies, said in a media statement.

To achieve this result, Cerny and his colleagues subjected the compound to high shocks, generating high temperatures, inside a ball mill. This is an energy-efficient method that is widely used in the cement industry. Once this was done, the material was put to the test.

Knowing that for a battery to work, the electrolyte, whether liquid or solid, must be in intimate contact with the positive and negative electrodes, the scientists had to make sure the one they developed was contained firmly within the battery.

“To achieve that, pressure must be applied by means of screws or springs. We looked for the ideal ‘force’ to exert on our solid electrolyte,” said co-author Matteo Brighi. “It was shown that this should be around 400 atmospheres, equivalent to the pressure under water at a depth of 4,000 meters, which can be achieved very easily with a few turns of a screw.”

In Cerny and Brighi’s view, these discoveries pave the way for easier production of sodium batteries, especially in the automotive industry.