Battery Metals

Commodities, for good reason, are not the flavor of the month with investors but for anyone looking ahead 2019 could be a good year for copper and nickel, if 400 metal industry professionals are correctly reading their crystal balls.

The flipside of the optimism in a survey taken in the British capital during London Metals Week is a negative outlook for two other metals, zinc and aluminum.

Conducted by Macquarie, an Australian-based investment bank, the survey asks LMW delegates to rank their metal preferences for the next 12-months in terms of those in which they might take a long (or buy) position and those they are likely to short (or sell).

Copper was seen by 45% of respondents as the metal they would most likely buy, followed by nickel with a 31% positive response.

Interestingly, they are the same two metals which topped last year’s LMW survey when the scores were 33% for copper and 31% for nickel — though the result has been mixed.

Dr Copper Caught A Summer Cold

Copper as anyone exposed to the metal which is sometimes referred to as Dr Copper for its linkage to manufacturing activity and its wide range of uses, started 2018 well at $3.20 a pound, peaking at $3.30/lb in June, before collapsing in the face of the China v U.S. trade war to $2.62/lb and only now creeping back to $2.83/lb

Undeterred by last year’s incorrect tip LMW delegates have gone even harder on copper with their latest 45% long tip, matched by a sharp fall in the number of delegates taking a short view of copper with last year’s 23% short dropping to 5% for 2019, the lowest of all the metals.

Nickel is the only member of the base metal family that also includes aluminium, lead, zinc and tin, to be trading at a higher price this year than at the last LMW gathering with the positive view of nickel based on demand in its traditional market of stainless steel and its new-found role as a key metal in long-life batteries used in electric cars.

Zinc, the top metal short last year is also the top short this year thanks to concern about rising supply, while aluminum has seen its short ranking creep up from 22% last year to the latest reading of 24% with the biggest influence on aluminium likely to be tariff-hit supply on Rusal, the big Russian producer of the metal.

Blame The Speculators

Copper’s sharp fall after June, according to responses from 47% of delegates, was largely a result of speculative trading and likely to be temporary, while 38% agreed with a suggestion that it was part speculative and part deserved.

Perhaps the most useful aspect for investors from the metal traders survey is price expectation with 55% expecting copper to trade in range from $2.98/lb to $3.31/lb and 29% seeing the range being from $2.63/lb to $2.98/lb.

The aluminum price, according to 45% of delegates, will be between 93 cents a pound and $1.04/lb while 65% of delegates expect nickel to trade above $6.13/lb, up modestly on its current price of $5.80/lb

Chile’s mining minister Baldo Prokurica asked the London Metals Exchange (LME) Wednesday to consider trading the coveted metal used in the batteries that power electric vehicles (EVs) and high-tech devices, and so provide greater “clarity” about its value.

On his first visit to Britain after taking office in March of this year, Prokurica met with local companies about potential partnerships with state-miner Codelco to eventually produce value-added lithium products, EFE news agency reports.

In July, the LME asked companies that assess prices of battery-grade lithium to submit proposals to supply a reference for cash-settled contracts it plans to launch next year. Currently, producers negotiate contracts with buyers, but the terms of the deals are not made public.

“We want to generate conditions for our products to be sold in a transparent manner, and that raises the possibility that lithium be traded on the LME so there can be clarity about its value,” the minister said, according to Chilean paper Estrategia.

Already the world’s top copper producer, Chile holds about 48% of the known lithium reserves, and it’s the second largest miner of the metal, after Australia, with 80,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent produced last year. But both companies and the government are working hard on reversing that.

Over the past several months, Chile’s SQM — the world’s number two lithium producer — has been expanding its mines. The company recently finished the first stage of a lithium carbonate ramp-up in Chile’s Salar del Carmen, reaching a capacity of 70k million tonnes a year.

“Our next step will be to work towards our goal of 120k MT/year, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2019,” chief executive officer Patricio de Solminihac said in August.

The firm actually believes it will soon overtake US-based competitor Albemarle as the world’s top lithium miner, by 2022 to be exact. SQM would boost production capacity that year to 28% of the world’s total versus Albemarle’s 16%.

Chile expects lithium to soon become its second largest mining asset, just behind copper. It’s currently the country’s fourth biggest export.

With a ruined 13th Century castle, the Irish town of Carlow is an unlikely staging post in the super-charged rise of a key player in China’s push to dominate the global electric-vehicle revolution.

Ganfeng Lithium Co. sent a team to the town — a 90-minute drive southwest of Dublin — in 2013, shuttling between prospective lithium deposits dotted through the verdant countryside. It was part of their company’s first foray outside China amid a drive to boost production of key materials needed to make rechargeable batteries.

With projects and partnerships now spanning South America to Australia, Ganfeng is aiming to use proceeds from a share sale in Hong Kong this week to continue a growth spree that’s forecast to make it the industry’s second-largest producer from this year.

“They understood so many years back — in the early 2000s — that lithium would be driving all of the green energy revolution,” said Kirill Klip, a former executive with Ganfeng’s first overseas partner, International Lithium Corp., who joined the working party in Ireland. “It’s a very hands-on approach, literally — they were working with our geologists turning over rocks, studying all the lithium boulders,” said Klip, now executive chairman of TNR Gold Corp.

Since that Irish expedition, Ganfeng’s share of refined lithium output has jumped from about 6 percent in 2013 to an estimated 11 percent this year, according to Roskill Information Services Ltd. It accounts for about a quarter of battery-grade lithium hydroxide, the material that’s now most sought after by automakers, the researcher’s data shows.

Formed in 2000 in southeastern Jiangxi province and listed in Shenzhen a decade later, Ganfeng’s expertise has been in processing lithium raw materials — which come typically from South America’s salt lakes or mines in Australia — into the next stage chemical products that can be used in lithium-ion batteries.

Its rapid growth and plans to use its share sale proceeds to lift output further have drawn blue-chip customers anxious to secure long-term supply. Since August, Ganfeng has struck new agreements with Tesla Inc., BMW AG, and battery producer LG Chem Ltd.

“They’ve reacted quickly in a changing market and that’s enabled them to grow their output to market requirements,” Robert Baylis, a London-based analyst with Roskill, said by phone. “Other companies haven’t been able to do that with the same speed.”

That swift growth has been well timed. Fewer than one million EVs had been sold in total at the start of 2016, there are now about four million on the world’s roads and it’ll take only about another six months to add a further million, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The jump in lithium output has swelled Ganfeng’s earnings — forecast to rise about a third this year — and catapulted the company ahead of established industry leaders such as FMC Corp. in terms of volumes. It’s on course to surpass the second-largest, Chile’s Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile SA, this year, according to consultant CRU Group, and is seen eventually challenging the No. 1, Albemarle Corp.

“It’s changed the face of the industry — you had the big three and now you’ve gone to the big five,” said Mike Tamlin, chief operating officer of Neometals Ltd., a partner with Gangfeng and Mineral Resources Ltd., in the Mt. Marion mine in Western Australia. “Arguably the pecking order in the big five has changed” with the expansion of Ganfeng and Tianqi Lithium Corp., he said.

Ganfeng added a stake in Mt. Marion in 2015 and made its first overseas investment in 2011 with Canada’s International Lithium, which remains a partner on prospective development projects in Argentina and the Avalonia venture in Ireland. With Lithium Americas Corp., Ganfeng is aiming to begin production in 2020 at the Cauchari-Olaroz project in Argentina’s northwestern Jujuy province, according to filings.

Still, the company remains disciplined on its growth plans, Vice Chairman Wang Xiaoshen said this week during an interview in Shanghai.

“We lithium suppliers still have to be careful not to over-expand our business, we have to be more conservative,” said Wang. “We want to do things step-by-step, every year see how the market grows, see how the near-term demand grows,” he said.

Recent expansions were announced only once the company had secured long-term supply agreements with customers such as LG Chem and BMW, according to Wang. “So we don’t just dream about big demand coming and then build capacity,” he said, adding that Ganfeng can expand relatively quickly when needed.

While this week’s share sale has attracted cornerstone investors including battery producers LG Chem and Samsung SDI Co., the listing was priced at the bottom of the expected range, according a statement published Wednesday in the South China Morning Post.

Ganfeng’s shares in Shenzhen dropped as much as 10 percent and competitor Tianqi fell as much as 9 percent. In Australia, Orocobre Ltd. slipped as much as 6.4 percent and Neometals declined 2 percent.

The listing price was “significantly undervalued” as investors were put off by factors such as depressed spot lithium prices, according to Ganfeng’s Wang, who said the company’s priority was to get financing for its near-term projects and that it now wants to move on.

For the longer-term, Ganfeng is positioning itself for opportunities beyond raw materials, including battery production and recycling.

The producer “has always had a very forward-looking approach,” said Andrew Miller, a London-based analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, an industry consultant. Expansions into recycling and cell production “will be crucial for the company to sustain its growth into the next chapter of battery market developments,” he said.

It seems like every few months there’s a new cell phone, laptop, or tablet that is so exciting people line up around the block to get their hands on it. While the perpetual introduction of new, slightly more advanced electronics has made businesses like Apple hugely successful, the short shelf life of these electronics is bad for the environment.

Modern electronics are filled with circuit boards on which various metals and plastics are soldered together. Some of these materials are toxic — or break down into toxic substances. There are efforts underway to boost recycling of e-waste, recovering materials that can be reused and properly disposing of the rest. But most devices end up added to the growing piles of e-waste in landfills.

Instead of adding more trash to these ever-growing piles, there is an opportunity to create electronics that are biodegradable. That’s why other researchers and I are looking to the emerging field of paper-based electronics — known as “papertronics.” They’re flexible — even foldable — sustainable, friendly to the environment and low-cost.

But to be truly eco-friendly, papertronics can’t use traditional batteries, which are made of metals and caustic acids, to store and discharge electricity. Recently, my chemist colleague Omowunmi Sadik and I developed a paper battery that’s recyclable and biodegradable, as well as reliable enough to actually use. The key is bacteria.

Flexible Bio-Batteries

I’ve developed flexible batteries, batteries powered by saliva and more. I figured that when seeking to power paper-based electronics, it made sense to try to make a battery out of paper. Fortunately, paper is a good potential battery material: It’s flexible, a good insulator — which makes it a good platform for mounting electronic components on — and absorbs and releases fluids easily. We added polymers — poly (amic) acid and poly(pyromellitic dianhydride-p-phenylenediamine) — to improve those electrical characteristics.

Then, to store energy in the battery, in place of the metals and acids that react chemically to generate electrons, we added bacteria. When these batteries are eventually commercialized, they’ll use bacteria that are safe for humans and the environment and well-contained to reduce any other contamination.

Because the paper is rough and porous, the bacteria stick to it, and generate their own energy by breaking down almost any available organic material, including plant material or wastewater. At the moment, we’re prepackaging source material, but it could also come from the environment. This chemical reaction produces electrons. Normally in a bacterial reaction, those electrons would bond with oxygen, but we’ve built our battery to limit oxygen and substitute an electrode, meaning we can capture the electron flow and use it to power devices.

We were concerned that oxygen could get into the paper and interrupt the electron flow between the bacteria, decreasing the battery’s efficiency. We found that while that does happen, it has minimal effects. That’s because so many bacterial cells are so tightly attached to the paper fibers; they form a multi-layer biofilm that shields the chemical reaction from most oxygen.

We also wanted a battery that could biodegrade. The bacteria in the battery itself, once they’re done releasing energy, can break down the paper and polymers into harmless components. In water, our battery easily biodegraded, without any special equipment or other microorganisms to aid in the breakdown.

The polymer-paper structures are lightweight, low-cost, and flexible. That flexibility also allows for the batteries to fold like a normal piece of paper, or be stacked on top of each other. That lets more battery power fit into smaller spaces.

Papertronics can be particularly useful in remote areas with limited resources because they’re powered by bacteria that can inhabit even the most extreme of conditions and break down nearly any material to produce electrons. They don’t need a well-established power grid, either. In addition, though paper batteries are designed to be disposable after they’re used, their materials are recyclable — and new batteries can be created from recycled paper.

As revolutionary as paper-based bio-batteries are for future electronic devices, they’re fairly straightforward to make. The polymers and bacteria can be blended with paper in traditional manufacturing processes, including roll-to-roll printing and screen printing — or even be painted or poured right onto paper.

Other materials can also be added to the paper batteries — like metals, semiconductors, insulators, and nanoparticles. These and other substances can add more properties and capabilities to paper-based devices, opening new doors for the next generation of electronics.

A utility is hoping a large Tesla battery being installed in northern Colorado will save it up to $1 million annually by storing energy that would otherwise go waste.

The Daily Times-Call reports United Power is expecting to bring the lithium-ion battery being installed east of Longmont onto the grid early next month.

The utility’s New Energy Director Jerry Marizza says the battery supplied by the California-based automotive and energy company will have a storage capacity of four megawatts over four hours, enough to power 600 to 700 homes.

Marizza says the battery is expected to save the utility about $80,000 a month by capturing energy generated on the grid overnight and saving it for peak demand hours.

MIT engineers have found a way to directly “pinprick” microscopic holes into graphene as the material is grown in the lab. With this technique, they have fabricated relatively large sheets of graphene (“large,” meaning roughly the size of a postage stamp), with pores that could make filtering certain molecules out of solutions vastly more efficient.

Such holes would typically be considered unwanted defects, but the MIT team has found that defects in graphene — which consists of a single layer of carbon atoms — can be an advantage in fields such as dialysis. Typically, much thicker polymer membranes are used in laboratories to filter out specific molecules from solution, such as proteins, amino acids, chemicals, and salts.

If it could be tailored with pores small enough to let through certain molecules but not others, graphene could substantially improve dialysis membrane technology: The material is incredibly thin, meaning that it would take far less time for small molecules to pass through graphene than through much thicker polymer membranes.

The researchers also found that simply turning down the temperature during the normal process of growing graphene will produce pores in the exact size range as most molecules that dialysis membranes aim to filter. The new technique could thus be easily integrated into any large-scale manufacturing of graphene, such as a roll-to-roll process that the team has previously developed.

“If you take this to a roll-to-roll manufacturing process, it’s a game changer,” says lead author Piran Kidambi, formerly an MIT postdoc and now an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University. “You don’t need anything else. Just reduce the temperature, and we have a fully integrated manufacturing setup for graphene membranes.”

Kidambi’s MIT co-authors are Rohit Karnik, associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Jing Kong, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, along with researchers from Oxford University, the National University of Singapore, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Their paper appears today in Advanced Materials.

Pristine defects

Kidambi and his colleagues previously developed a technique to generate nanometer-sized pores in graphene, by first fabricating pristine graphene using conventional methods, then using oxygen plasma to etch away at the fully formed material to create pores. Other groups have used focused beams of ions to methodically drill holes into graphene, but Kidambi says these techniques are difficult to integrate into any large-scale manufacturing process.

“Scalability of these processes are extremely limited,” Kidambi says. “They would take way too much time, and in an industrially quick process, such pore-generating techniques would be challenging to do.”

So he looked for ways to make nanoporous graphene in a more direct fashion. As a PhD student at Cambridge University, Kidambi spent much of his time looking for ways to make pristine, defect-free graphene, for use in electronics. In that context, he was trying to minimize the defects in graphene that occurred during chemical vapor deposition (CVD) — a process by which researchers flow gas across a copper substrate within a furnace. At high enough temperatures, of about 1,000 degrees Celsius, the gas eventually settles onto the substrate as high quality graphene.

“That was when the realization hit me: I just have to go back to my repository of processes and pick out those which give me defects, and try them in our CVD furnace,” Kidambi says.

As it turns out, the team found that by simply lowering the temperature of the furnace to between 850 and 900 degrees Celsius, they were able to directly produce nanometer-sized pores as the graphene was grown.

“When we tried this, it surprised us a little that it really works,” Kidambi says. “This [temperature] condition really gave us the sizes we need to make graphene dialysis membranes.”

“This is one of several advances that will ultimately make graphene membranes practical for a range of applications,” Karnik adds. “They may find use in biotechnological separations including in the preparation of drugs or molecular therapeutics, or perhaps in dialysis therapies.”

A Swiss cheese support

While the team is not entirely sure why a lower temperature creates nanoporous graphene, Kidambi suspects that it has something to do with how the gas in the reaction is deposited onto the substrate.

“The way graphene grows is, you inject a gas and the gas disassociates on the catalyst surface and forms carbon atom clusters which then form nuclei, or seeds,” Kidambi explains. “So you have many small seeds that graphene can start growing from to form a continuous film. If you reduce the temperature, your threshold for nucleation is lower so you get many nuclei. And if you have too many nuclei, they can’t grow big enough, and they are more prone to defects. We don’t know exactly what the formation mechansim of these defects, or pores, is, but we see it every single time.”

The researchers were able to fabricate nanoporous sheets of graphene. But as the material is incredibly thin, and now pocked with holes, alone, it would likely come apart like paper-thin Swiss cheese if any solution of molecules were to flow across it. So the team adapted a method to cast a thicker supporting layer of polymer on top of the graphene.

The supported graphene was now tough enough to withstand normal dialysis procedures. But even if target molecules were to pass through the graphene, they would be blocked by the polymer support. The team needed a way to produce pores in the polymer that were significantly larger than those in graphene, to ensure that any small molecules passing through the ultrathin material would easily and quickly pass through the much thicker polymer, similar to a fish swimming through a port hole just its size, and then immediately passing through a much large tunnel.

The team ultimately found that by submersing the stack of copper, graphene, and polymer in a solution of water, and using conventional processes to etch away the copper layer, the same process naturally created large pores in the polymer support that were hundreds of times larger than the pores in graphene. Combining their techniques, they were able to create sheets of nanoporous graphene, each measuring about 5 square centimeters.

“To the best of our knowledge, so far this is the largest atomically thin nanoporous membrane made by direct formation of pores,” Kidambi says.

Currently, the team has produced pores in graphene measuring approximately 2 to 3 nanometers wide, which they found was small enough to quickly filter salts such as potassium chloride (0.66 nanometers), and small molecules such as the amino acid L-Tryptophan (about 0.7 nanometers), food coloring Allura Red Dye (1 nanometer), and vitamin B-12 (1.5 nanometers) to varying degrees. The material did not filter out slightly larger molecules, such as the egg protein lysozyme (4 nanometers). The team is now working to tailor the size of graphene pores to precisely filter molecules of various sizes.

“We now have to control these size defects and make tunable sized pores,” Kidambi says. “Defects are not always bad, and if you can make the right defects, you can have many different applications for graphene.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy.