Battery Metals

Copper prices eased on Friday after disappointing manufacturing data from top consumer China dented appetite ahead of a meeting of global leaders at a G20 meeting.

China’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell to a 2016 low of 50 in November, missing market expectations and down from 50.2 in October. Meanwhile, all eyes will be on a planned meeting between U.S President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday to see whether they can find a way to calm the waters and make progress toward resolving differences that threaten the global economy.

The tit-for-tat trade dispute has rattled global markets and sapped demand for base metals, in some cases overriding supportive factors such as falling stocks.

“The Chinese PMI wasn’t really convincing ahead of the G20 summit,” said Commerzbank’s head of commodities research Eugen Weinberg.

“The market is to a great extent discounting the chance of a breakthrough in talks between the U.S. and China over the weekend and the PMI just adds to the jitters.”

Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange (LME) fell 0.3 percent to $6,193 per tonne while aluminium slipped 0.1 percent to $1,938.50 tonnes.

Aluminium in London and on the Shanghai Futures Exchange (ShFE) was on track for its third straight month of declines.

CHALCO SUPPLY CUTS: Aluminum Corp of China Ltd, 2600.HK, known as Chalco, is cutting output 47,000 tonnes or 12 percent of its output as Chinese aluminium prices sank to a fresh two-year low.

ALUMINIUM: Norwegian metals maker Norsk Hydro expects global primary aluminium demand growth to slow next year and says it is being impacted “heavily” by an output slowdown at a key alumina plant in Brazil. ZINC SPREADS: Falling stocks pushed the premium for cash zinc to the three month price to $101 per tonne, its highest since 1998. STOCKS: Inventories of zinc in LME-monitored warehouses are close to a 10-year-low of 88,600 tonnes. In warehouses monitored by ShFE, zinc stocks fell 25 percent from last Friday to 26,779 tonnes.

CODELCO: Chile’s Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, said mine output fell 3 percent in the first nine months of the year as ore grades fell sharply. STEEL: The U.S. administration is moving to moderate its steel trade tariffs but countries in Europe and beyond are loath to lower protections for their steelmakers as long as U.S.-China trade tensions prevail.

OTHER METALS: Zinc added 0.9 percent to $2,494.50 per tonne, lead rose 2.1 percent to $1,971, tin inched 0.1 percent higher to $18,550, while nickel gained 0.1 percent to $11,065.

Subhash Chandra-controlled Essel Infraprojects Ltd is planning to manufacture lithium ion batteries in India, two people directly aware of the development said. The company is in talks to acquire lithium mines abroad and plans to set up a plant in Andhra Pradesh for manufacturing these batteries for electric cars, the people said, requesting anonymity.

The decision to invest in manufacturing lithium ion batteries by media baron Chandra, who is also a member of the Rajya Sabha, coincides with the proposal of the Prime Minister’s Office to offer incentives to promote local manufacturing of batteries and parts of electric vehicles.

Essel Infra’s ventures in this segment will be housed under a new business arm, Essel Green Mobility.

A spokesperson for Essel Infra Projects declined to respond to an email sent by Mint on Wednesday evening.

The world’s largest lithium reserves are concentrated in South America and Africa, with significant reserves also available in the US, China and Australia.

Chandra, who has announced plans to sell his solar power and media businesses, is aiming to become an end-to-end service provider in the electric vehicle ecosystem in India.

In July, Essel Infra announced an investment of ₹1,750 crore in Uttar Pradesh for setting up 250 charging stations and 1,000 battery-swapping stations across the state.

Essel Group is looking at the electric mobility business as opportunities in this segment are going to be huge with the government pushing the manufacturing of electric vehicles and their components especially lithium-ion batteries, one of the two people cited above said.

“Subhash Chandra is not only interested in manufacturing and recycling of lithium ion batteries in India but he wants to cater to the entire electric mobility space with regard to public transport system. The electric vehicle business will attain huge size in India and across the world in the decades to come and early movers will always have some advantage. He wants to manufacture the components rather than buying them from others,” the person said.

Apart from manufacturing lithium ion batteries, the company is also entering the business of renting electric three-wheelers.

Essel Infra is likely to pilot the first of its green mobility businesses in December. The company will launch its commercial e-rickshaw rentals business in Mohali, allowing drivers to rent e-rickshaws and their batteries on monthly packages. The per day charge is set at about ₹299 and a separate charge of ₹99 to rent two fully charged batteries.

Essel has also set up a charging station in Mohali. The company wants to start with providing 100 e-rickshaws in Mohali and then expand to as many as 500 such vehicles in Mohali, Chandigarh and Panchkula. Essel is also in talks with the Uttar Pradesh government to eventually take its green mobility business to 20 cities in the state, including Greater Noida and Ghaziabad.

“Change is inevitable and is good for the industry that big business houses in India are also stepping into the world of future mobility,” said Puneet Gupta, associate director, IHS Markit.

“Battery will be at the heart of mobility and I think this be the biggest disruption which will happen in the automotive industry in years to come. Oil was the past and Lithium is the future. Looks like Zee Group is ready to embrace the future,” added Gupta.

Mint couldn’t independently verify the total investment to be made by the company in lithium-ion manufacturing business.

“As an end-user of commercial electric vehicles, no individual is willing to buy EVs yet,” the second person close to the development said.

Essel is also working with Indian Institute of Technology Madras to create an app that can locate the vehicles and monitor battery usage.

Discussions about batteries often revolve around energy density. What we want is a battery that stores a whole lot of energy in a very tiny volume, preferably in a manner that doesn’t involve explosions or fire. At the cutting edge of research, what we get are batteries that are a mix of amazing and amazingly bad.

Modern batteries are, quite frankly, a miracle compared to ye olde lead acid battery. Yet they still contain less energy per unit mass than the equivalent mass of wood. Essentially, we simply don’t pack enough atoms into a small enough volume to compete with hydrocarbons. But, now it seems that graphene—it’s always graphene—might help pack lithium in.

The invisible metal

Although there are many ways to make a lithium-ion battery, the chemistry boils down to the following: lithium is stored in some form at one electrode. The lithium is released as an ion, where it travels to another electrode and reacts. At the same time, the electrons that complete the reaction travel out into the world via one electrode, do some work, and end up at the other electrode, where they complete the reaction.

The key here is that the lithium is usually stored as a light and low-density lithium carbide. Finding materials that increase the density of lithium is one way to increase battery capacity.

Here is where battery research often runs into problems. Lithium is a very light element. Carbon, the other main constituent of a battery, is also a very light element. When viewed through an electron microscope, they look almost identical. That makes it very difficult to examine how lithium builds up at an electrode and makes it hard to see the variations in structures that it forms as it is stored (or how those structures come apart as it is removed).

It is worse than that, though. Electron microscopes usually use quite energetic electrons to create an image. The electrons have more than enough energy to knock carbon and lithium atoms out of the structure being examined. By the time you have created your image, you have destroyed the structure you imaged. Not ideal.

Enter a group of scientists with a transmission electron microscope that has been designed to work with low-energy electrons. The microscope still has sufficient resolution to see single atoms, so structures can be determined. By examining how much energy the electrons lose as they go through the sample, the researchers can also figure out the sample contents. Finally, the time it takes to gather the image is short enough (about one second) that the researchers can observe the build up and decay of structures as the battery is used.

A lithium sandwich

Since transmission electron microscopy requires that electrons pass through the sample, the carbon-lithium layer had to be very thin. The researchers chose to use a ribbon of a graphene double-layer (graphene is a single layer of graphene with the carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern). A blob of electrolyte-containing lithium ions was placed at one end of the graphene ribbon.

A series of electrodes were placed along the ribbon to measure and set voltages. The voltages were used to drive lithium into the ribbon and allow it to leave again. When lithium accumulates in the ribbon, the resistance drops, allowing a second set of electrodes to detect the presence of lithium.

The researchers don’t say it, but I think they were quite surprised by what happened. The lithium moves quite rapidly in the gap between the two graphene ribbons. On the scale of their graph, lithium appears between the electrodes instantly. From the movie, it looks like it takes about 14s to travel 50 micrometers, which I think is shockingly fast.

The amount of lithium is also pretty surprising. By examining the structure and elemental composition, the researchers found that the lithium was not forming a lithium carbide, as expected. Instead, it was forming multiple layers of crystalline lithium with only the outermost layer binding to the carbon. But the metallic lithium was not in its usual form. Instead, the lithium forms a high-density state that is normally found at low temperature or very high pressure.

Don’t get overexcited

This is quite interesting, and it may even prove useful. But not yet. For on thing, the high-density lithium only forms between two sheets of very nearly perfect graphene, not the sort of graphene that you can buy from a manufacturer. Indeed, near the edges of imperfections, the energy imparted by the electrons in the electron microscope was enough to boil off the lithium metal.

Even if we could get large amounts of high-quality, double-layer graphene sheets, there is no certainty that the lithium will diffuse as deeply as required during a charging cycle. It is pretty easy to imagine the first lithium ion building up in a clump that blocks the rest of the lithium from moving into the sandwich.

It is also not certain that the graphene survives the process for very long. This is one of the main problems with batteries involving metallic lithium: the electrodes destroy themselves over multiple cycles. We’ve no idea if graphene will last any longer than current electrode designs.

That said, the researchers are not presenting this as a battery-ready technology. Rather, it is an excellent example of how an experimental necessity has led to an interesting new set of observations that we will probably learn a lot from. And, if we are lucky, it will eventually help make batteries better.

Copper and other metals extended gains on Thursday as investors bought riskier assets on speculation U.S. interest rates may be near a peak, but trade was thin ahead of Chinese economic data and the G20 summit.

Most metals closed higher on Wednesday after the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve suggested the central bank could be nearing an end to its three-year rate tightening cycle, giving a boost to global share markets.

Many investors were on the sidelines, however, ahead of trade talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday during the G20 summit in Argentina.

“I don’t think there’s any conviction in the market on what the outcome would be,” said analyst Carsten Menke at Julius Baer in Zurich.

Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange was up 0.2 percent to $6,212 a tonne in closing open outcry trading, after rising 1.3 percent in the previous session.

While trade tensions have hit market sentiment, more important for the fundamentals of the metals markets is the slowdown in top metals consumer China, Menke added.

* CHINA PMI: Data on Friday is expected to show China’s factories struggled to grow for a second straight month in November. The official manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) is expected to come in at 50.2, just above the neutral mark of 50. “It’s expected to be unchanged, but if it falls below 50, it would be another hit to sentiment,” Menke said.

* INDONESIA: Also supporting copper was news that PT Smelting, the Indonesian copper smelting unit of Japan’s Mitsubishi Materials , had declared force majeure.

* SPREADS: Tight availability for nearby supplies of copper and zinc were also boosting those markets, evidenced in spreads, traders said. The premium of cash copper over the three-month contract has risen to $42.50 a tonne from $14 two weeks ago, while the premium of cash zinc over three-month zinc has gained to $93 a tonne from $56.50 since Nov. 13.

* ZINC STOCKS: LME inventories of zinc hit a fresh low since February 2008, having halved since mid-August . LME three-month zinc gained 0.7 percent to finish at $2,470 a tonne.

* ALUMINIUM: Norwegian metals maker Norsk Hydro said it expected global primary aluminium demand growth to slow next year. LME aluminium added 0.4 percent to end at $1,940 a tonne.

* NICKEL TECHNICALS: Nickel is rebounding, partly due to
oversold conditions, but further downside was possible, Stéphanie Aymes, head of technical analysis at Societe Generale, said in a note. “In case of further bearish momentum, $10,215 and $9,707 will be next objectives.”

* PRICES: Nickel climbed 2.4 percent to close at $11,055 a tonne, lead rose 0.3 percent to $1,931, while tin gained 1.6 percent to $18,525.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) predicts that Americans will eat 222.2 pounds of red meat and poultry this year, a new record. The United Nations expects global meat consumption to double by 2050, requiring an enormous number of livestock animals.

A new study from Georgia Tech examines the main byproduct of all those extra animals: waste. It’s a growing problem—but one with a few potential upsides if people are resourceful and willing to get down into the filth.

Claiming to have created “the first global estimate of annual recoverable human and animal fecal biomass,” Georgia Tech researchers looked at the growing amount of waste across the planet to see if any of it could be useful. Joe Brown, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, says in a press statement:

“Exposure to both human and animal waste represent a threat to public health, particularly in low-income areas of the world that may not have resources to implement the best management and sanitation practices. But estimating the amount of recoverable feces in the world also highlights the enormous potential from a resource perspective.”
The most valuable part of this waste may be all the metals that lay within. Livestock ingesting metal is a common phenomenon— roughly 55 to 75 percent of the cattle slaughtered in the eastern United States alone have digested pieces of metal, whether that’s a nail, a piece of wire, or something more. If all the metal could be recovered from the waste of a million animals, it would be worth approximately $13 million.

The most recent year with reliable data, 2014, shows that there were 4.3 billion tons of recoverable waste. Within that waste, animal waste outnumbered the human equivalent by 5 to 1. Researchers looked at data from 2003 to 2014, and on top of that examined projections going into 2030. In that initial 11-year time period of waste, bio-matter (the polite term for feces) grew by over 57 million tons. By 2030, that number could be as big as five billion tons. Livestock waste would outweigh that from humans six to one.

Elements like phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium could be salvaged from such waste. If current waste trends continue, the planet’s total annual fecal and urinary biomass could add up to quite a bit: 100 million tons of phosphorus, 30 million tons of potassium, 18 million tons of calcium, and 5.5 million tons of magnesium by the researchers’ estimates.

The researchers don’t deny that fecal matter is ultimately more of a problem then it is a solution—livestock creates 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gases across the globe, offering a significant contribution to global warming.

Waste will always exist. It’s also likely that, barring major shifts in global eating patterns, meat consumption will continue to remain at high levels. By highlighting how waste could be used and recycled, they want to show that this waste can help contribute to a cleaner planet.

When Mandel Metals, an aluminum distributor outside Chicago, found its business threatened by President Trump’s tariffs on foreign metals, it filed hundreds of requests with the administration to exclude its imports from the levies.

Again and again, the administration said yes, allowing Mandel to import — if it wanted to — up to 600 million pounds of tariff-free aluminum from Greece, Italy, France, Norway and, perhaps most surprising, China.

Mr. Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on steel and aluminum to prevent China and other countries from flooding the American market with cheap metals, which he said posed a national security threat by “degrading” the industrial base. But his administration has granted nearly 3,000 requests that could exempt Chinese-made metal products from the tariffs, according to a congressional analysis shared with The New York Times.

Since March, when the tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum went into effect, the Commerce Department has approved a higher share of exclusion requests that include imports from China than it has from American allies like Japan and Canada.

The approval rate stems largely from the success of two companies. Mandel has won 400 aluminum exclusions — nearly half of all the exemptions granted to companies seeking relief from the aluminum levies through early November. Those exclusions allow Mandel to import six times the amount of metal it sells every year, and company officials say they will not come close to using all of that allowance.

Greenfield Industries, a South Carolina maker of saw blades and other cutting tools, has won 1,000 exclusions from the steel tariffs. Greenfield is owned by China’s Top-Eastern Group.

The exclusions stem from the Commerce Department’s process for determining whether companies can win tariff relief for imported metals. The requests are generally granted as long as no American producer formally objects and says it can provide the metals.

Both supporters and opponents of the tariffs have criticized the process as haphazard and ineffective. Aluminum trade groups — including some that have criticized the tariffs — say the fact that Mandel received approval to import more metal, including aluminum from China, than it can use highlights the program’s flaws. Others have criticized the process for giving large domestic producers, like Nucor and Century Aluminum, outsize power to block exemptions by claiming they can provide the metals.

“Generally, it seems the department is not evaluating whether there is actually demand in the market for these large volumes and has granted the requests based simply on the absence of any objections,” Heidi Brock, the president of the Aluminum Association, wrote in a letter to the Commerce Department this month. She cited Mandel and another set of exclusions, to Ta Chen International, for potentially one billion pounds of imports from China.

According to department statistics, companies filed 51,059 steel exclusion requests and 6,701 aluminum requests through early November. It had ruled on 18,137 of the steel requests, about 36 percent, and 981 of the aluminum requests, about 15 percent. Three-quarters of the steel decisions were approvals, compared with 85 percent for aluminum.

The approvals contrast with the exclusion process for the tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed on $50 billion worth of Chinese products. That process, which is being run by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, has denied 1,300 requests and approved none.

Perhaps no one is more puzzled by the process than Mandel’s executives, who say they don’t intend to import Chinese aluminum this year.

“Our intent was not to shoot the moon here and gobble up exclusions,” said Mike Ward, the company’s president. “We didn’t know any better. They seemingly greenlighted everything we sent them.”

Mandel doesn’t forge aluminum products in its headquarters facility in Franklin Park, Ill. “We take aluminum,” Mr. Ward said, “and cut it to a size our customers can use.”

The aluminum it buys is low end — and not what American producers specialize in these days. “There is a shortage of the common alloy being produced in the United States,” said Rick Mandel, the chairman and chief executive officer.

When Mandel officials called the Commerce Department this year for guidance on filing exclusion requests, they were surprised at how little information the government could offer. So they filed requests for every product they import. To date, 443 of them have been approved, or 45 percent of all aluminum exclusions issued by the department.

A Commerce Department spokesman said requests without objections, such as Mandel’s, were expedited in the review process.

“Exclusions are granted only when U.S. producers do not make the product in sufficient and reasonably available amount, in satisfactory quality, or for a specific national security consideration,” the spokesman said. He added that the tariffs “have led to significant restarts in the steel and aluminum industries in facilities across the country.”

Commerce Department statistics show steel imports are down 11 percent for this year. Census statistics show aluminum imports are down about 9 percent.

But the drop in foreign metal has not mollified Democrats, who say Mr. Trump’s approach is simply sowing uncertainty among American companies while allowing China to continue sending its metals into the United States.

“Trump talks tough but carries a flimsy stick,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, who is in line to chair a Ways and Means subcommittee when Democrats assume control of the House next year. “He doesn’t have a trade policy, just a series of contradictions — claiming national security justifies imposing the same tariffs on allies and adversaries alike, yet granting so many Chinese aluminum exemptions from these very tariffs.”