Battery Metals

At DESY’s X-ray light source PETRA III, a team led by Swedish researchers has produced the strongest bio-material that has ever been made. The artifical, but bio-degradable cellulose fibres are stronger than steel and even than dragline spider silk, which is usually considered the strongest bio-based material. The team headed by Daniel Söderberg from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm reports the work in the journal ACS Nano of the American Chemical Society.

The ultrastrong material is made of cellulose nanofibres (CNF), the essential building blocks of wood and other plant life. Using a novel production method, the researchers have successfully transferred the unique mechanical properties of these nanofibres to a macroscopic, lightweight material that could be used as an eco-friendly alternative for plastic in airplanes, cars, furniture and other products. “Our new material even has potential for biomedicine since cellulose is not rejected by your body,” explains Söderberg.

The scientists started with commercially available cellulose nanofibres that are just 2 to 5 nanometres in diameter and up to 700 nanometres long. A nanometre (nm) is a millionth of a millimetre. The nanofibres were suspended in water and fed into a small channel, just one millimetre wide and milled in steel. Through two pairs of perpendicular inflows additional deionized water and water with a low pH-value entered the channel from the sides, squeezing the stream of nanofibres together and accelerating it.

This process, called hydrodynamic focussing, helped to align the nanofibres in the right direction as well as their self-organisation into a well-packed macroscopic thread. No glue or any other component is needed, the nanofibres assemble into a tight thread held together by supramolecular forces between the nanofibres, for example electrostatic and Van der Waals forces.

With the bright X-rays from PETRA III the scientists could follow and optimise the process. “The X-rays allow us to analyse the detailed structure of the thread as it forms as well as the material structure and hierarchical order in the super strong fibres,” explains co-author Stephan Roth from DESY, head of the Micro- and Nanofocus X-ray Scattering Beamline P03 where the threads were spun. “We made threads up to 15 micrometres thick and several metres in length.”

Measurements showed a tensile stiffness of 86 gigapascals (GPa) for the material and a tensile strength of 1.57 GPa. “The bio-based nanocellulose fibres fabricated here are 8 times stiffer and have strengths higher than natural dragline spider silk fibres,” says Söderberg. “If you are looking for a bio-based material, there is nothing quite like it. And it is also stronger than steel and any other metal or alloy as well as glass fibres and most other synthetic materials.” The artificial cellulose fibres can be woven into a fabric to create materials for various applications. The researchers estimate that the production costs of the new material can compete with those of strong synthetic fabrics. “The new material can in principle be used to create bio-degradable components,” adds Roth.

The study describes a new method that mimics nature’s ability to accumulate cellulose nanofibres into almost perfect macroscale arrangements, like in wood. It opens the way for developing nanofibre material that can be used for larger structures while retaining the nanofibres’ tensile strength and ability to withstand mechanical load. “We can now transform the super performance from the nanoscale to the macroscale,” Söderberg underlines. “This discovery is made possible by understanding and controlling the key fundamental parameters essential for perfect nanostructuring, such as particle size, interactions, alignment, diffusion, network formation and assembly.” The process can also be used to control nanoscale assembly of carbon tubes and other nano-sized fibres.

Roughly half of China’s steelmaking capacity would have to comply with tough new emissions targets by 2020, according to a draft plan issued by the government and reviewed by Reuters, the latest move by Beijing to clean up its smoke-stack industries.

The plan would require 480 million tonnes of annual capacity in the world’s top steel producer to meet ultra-low emissions standards by 2020, the document issued by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) said.

An official at the MEE confirmed the authenticity of the document, which said the emissions target would rise to 900 million tonnes by 2025.

China produced 832 million tonnes of steel last year, compared to a production capacity of about 950 million tonnes.

The draft set a 2020 deadline for mills around the capital Beijing, the northern port city of Tianjin and Hebei province, the country’s top steelmaking region, to meet the new standards.

However, the Hebei cities of Tangshan and Handan, where hundreds of steel plants are located, may apply for an extension until 2022, the document said.

It said these cities faced a “heavy task to complete ultra-low emission upgrading”.

Mills that completed the upgrading will receive preferential treatment on electricity rates and taxes, and face lower capacity restrictions during the winter, the draft said.

Last winter, steel mills in 28 northern cities were ordered to cut as much as 50 percent of production capacity to reduce emissions.

The draft plan is the latest move against major polluters in Beijing’s anti-smog campaign, which aims to cut emissions of damaging PM2.5 air particles so small they can pass through humans’ lungs and affect other organs.

The new targets will require steel mills to install more filtering and dust extraction equipment and use a higher grade of raw materials to curb emissions of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and other particulate matter.

“Mills should be able to afford the investment of environmental equipment since profit margins of steelmaking are at a historical high level,” said Richard Lu, analyst at CRU consultancy in Beijing.

Profit margins for rebar touched 608 yuan ($95.61) a tonne in April, up more than 40 percent compared with a month ago, Mysteel data showed, while Jefferies had estimated rebar margins to hit a 10-year high of $134 per tonne.

However, steel industry executives said buying and operating environmental equipment could cost millions of dollars and reduce mill margins by 25-50 percent

An executive at a Shandong-based, state-owned steel firm said he was concerned about how the new standard is enforced across the milling industry.

“It is undoubtedly a good move for the country, but the problem here is if everyone, especially the small mills, will comply with it,” said the executive, who declined to be named.

Tata Steel moved back into profit at the start of this year, in large part due to a boost of more than £1.5bn from the restructuring of its pension scheme, prompting unions to demand that cuts to members’ benefits be reversed.

The Indian steelmaker swung to a profit of 146.9bn rupees (£1.6bn) in the three months to the end of March, from a loss of 11.7bn rupees a year earlier. It benefited from a one-off gain of £1.54bn related to the restructuring of its British pension scheme.

Britain’s Pensions Regulator agreed last year to allow Tata Steel UK to reduce its £15bn pension scheme liabilities, the main stumbling block in the Indian steelmaker’s efforts to merge its European business – which includes the Port Talbot steelworks in south Wales – with Germany’s Thyssenkrupp.

Of 122,000 UK pension scheme members, 83,000 opted to join the new British Steel pension scheme (BSPS) – one of the biggest in the country – and took a cut in benefits, in return for investment to secure jobs.

Core benefits were not cut but pension increases under the new scheme were reduced to the statutory minimum. The Community union says effectively increases are now based on the consumer prices index rather than the retail prices index, which means they will be lower.

The remaining members moved to the Pension Protection Fund (PPF), a government-backed pensions lifeboat, which entailed a 10% cut in benefits for most members, except existing pensioners. According to trustees and the Community union, the new BSPS was better for most people than the PPF.

Tata employs more than 8,000 people across the UK, including 3,500 in Port Talbot.

The Pensions Regulator said at the time that such arrangements were rare but necessary in this case to prevent the company becoming insolvent.

The National Trade Union Steel Coordinating Committee, which includes the Community and Unite unions, said the unions had helped deliver the new British Steel pension scheme because “all the experts told us the alternative was the inevitable insolvency of Tata Steel UK”.

“It was always expected the new BSPS would start with a significant buffer to enable it to pay out benefits to all members on a low-risk basis. We should be absolutely clear that this buffer is not Tata’s money, it is scheme members’ money which is ringfenced to pay out benefits over the lifetime of the scheme.

“The surplus for the new BSPS is higher than we expected, which we welcome as it strengthens our case for benefits to be restored.”

The unions have called on Tata and the pension scheme trustees to sit down with them. The first priority for the unions will be improving pension increases for members with pre-1997 service.

The pension scheme trustees said Tata’s “surplus was calculated using best estimate assumptions”.

The trustees are working on their own formal actuarial valuation of the BSPS, using “prudent assumptions”. This valuation is still expected to show a surplus, but a smaller one than Tata reported.

In February, the work and pensions committee said members were targeted by “vulture” financial advisers during the changes and accused the government, Tata and regulators of failing to protect them from a “major mis-selling scandal”.

Frank Field, the Labour MP and chair of work and pensions committee, said on Wednesday: “This is a promising beginning that offers some hope to the British Steel pensioners, who were left stranded at the mercy of the vultures circling the scheme for too long. Tata should clearly restate its commitment to increase payments to pensions at the earliest opportunity, as agreed with the trustees.”

Stephen Kinnock, the Labour MP whose Aberavon constituency includes the Port Talbot plant, said Tata was “logically and morally obliged to ensure that the benefits are restored to the members”.

“Along with the members I now look forward to seeing a detailed proposal from Tata Steel, setting out how it will set about restoring and redistributing the benefits to the members.”

The exchange to offer contracts in lithium, graphite and manganese among others, its head says

The London Metal Exchange will begin offering contracts in metals used in batteries within 18 months to capture the huge opportunities created by the rise of the electric car, according to its chief.

Demand for metals including lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite and manganese has surged with the growth in electric vehicles, particularly in China, which has become the largest electric car market worldwide as the government aggressively pushed development to deal with serious pollution problems.

“The battery industry is a big part of metal contracts now trading, as a result of the increasing popularity of electric cars,” LME chief executive Matthew Chamberlain told the annual LME Asia Week forum in Hong Kong on Thursday.

New futures contracts to be launched may include lithium, graphite and manganese, while additional contracts for the already tradeable nickel, copper, cobalt and aluminium will be explored, he said.

Chamberlain also said that alongside the battery sector, other new products in the pipeline included gold and silver options.

“The LME will introduce a new platform by the end of this year to make it quicker and easier to launch new products. The range of new products should be launched over the next 18 months,” he said.

The LME is the world’s largest metals exchange and is owned by Hong Kong stock market operator Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX). Some 900 people attended the annual conference, including representatives of electric vehicle makers.

Brokerage industry officials said the LME’s plans for new contracts were well timed, given the growth of the electric vehicle industry.

“Manufacturers of electric vehicle batteries would need to trade these metals and hence want to have futures or options contracts to hedge their risks,” said Gary Cheung, chairman of the Hong Kong Securities Association, the industry body for local brokers.

“With electric cars getting more popular in mainland China and other parts of the world, it is the right timing for the LME to launch related products for these manufacturers to do risk management. If end users could create a good liquidity pool, other investors would also like to trade,” Cheung said.

The LME saw first quarter overall trading volume rise 3 per cent year on year, partly as a result of a discount on trading costs introduced since October. Chamberlain said that aluminium trading doubled in April as concerns over a trade war between China and the US rose, and that while that may have been a one-time occurrence, turnover in other products would continue to grow due to the discount.

Speaking at the same forum, Joseph Chan Ho-lim, Hong Kong’s undersecretary for financial services and the treasury, noted that China’s grand strategy to create a global trading network, known as the “Belt and Road Initiative”, would increase demand for commodity trading.

Green told delegates during a presentation on lithium-ion battery growth commodity stories the global advisory group continued to see bullish prospects for lithium, natural graphite and nickel sulphate on the back of LiB demand growth.

But high-purity alumina (HPA) “is a huge growth story” albeit one emerging off a low base in the form of the estimated US$1.1 billion HPA market.

Green said HPA ran a close second to lithium in terms of the projected scale of the impact of LiB demand on an existing battery mineral commodity up to 2025, with plus-60% growth forecast.

HPA is used in LiB battery separator coatings, in electric vehicles and portable electronics. Rising sapphire glass use by smartphone manufacturers is also increasing demand for HPA.

“The eyes of the car companies turn from time to time and they’ve landed at the moment on HPA,” Green said.

“The demand [and higher pricing] is for high-purity 4N [99.99%] product. There is quite a lot of competition in China at the lower end, which has driven down prices there.”

ASX-listed HPA producer Altech Chemicals (ATC) said last month 4N HPA was fetching US$27,000 a tonne. A sub-30,000tpa market in 2017 could expand to more than 55,000t in 2021, and 86,000t in 2024.

Batteries emerged as a viable peak power resource so quickly that it’s hard to know what happens next.

Regulators in states like California and Arizona have turned to batteries instead of conventional natural gas plants to provide flexible power for evening peaks. They see this as crucial in containing the major cost driver for utilities, and in developing a cleaner, more efficient grid.

The storage industry believes this trend will accelerate quickly. Still, batteries can’t do everything that a gas combustion turbine can do.

A rapid transition to a storage-based peak power system could create vulnerabilities if it’s not done right. Little data exists to indicate what will happen if the peaker-to-storage swap becomes more widespread.

In the meantime, we can turn to a recent report by Ravi Manghani, GTM Research’s energy storage director. He analyzed run-time data from combustion turbines in the field to estimate the potential peak capacity market that storage could replace.

Storage can do more than one might expect. It can’t run as long a gas plant, but durations available on the market today can handle the short peak deliveries of combustion turbine plants. Storage cost declines in the next decade will make it increasingly competitive.

If this research bears out, we can expect a shift in power markets and the carbon and capital intensity of grid infrastructure.

Can it do the job?

Energy storage runs out, eventually.

That’s the chief operational difference compared to a gas peaker, which can keep generating as long as the gas keeps flowing. Within that constraint, though, storage can deliver peak capacity with aplomb.

Batteries ramp up their discharge faster than a gas plant. They run without dumping pollutants into the air, so they can sit much closer to dense load pockets than a new gas plant.

Can commercially available storage technologies provide enough peak power per charge to effectively replace a gas plant?

Not always, but it could for a significant number of cases, Manghani found.

It helps that peakers run rarely. Wood Mackenzie calculates the average peaker plant capacity factor will sit between 6 percent and 5 percent over the next two decades. That’s a low number of hours to replicate.

However, the overall hours in the year don’t matter as much as how many hours the plant runs when it starts up.

To parse that, Manghani pulled 8,640 hours of operational data from four gas combustion turbines: two that exhibit characteristics representative of the 109 gigawatts of U.S. combustion turbine capacity, one in wind-heavy Texas and one in solar-heavy California.

The Troy Energy plant in Ohio, for instance, started 46 times in 2017. It averaged 5.2 hours per start, but had eight starts longer than eight hours, and three starts that lasted longer than 10 hours.

The California plant had 14 starts that lasted longer than eight hours and eight that lasted longer than 10 hours.

Manghani then compared these operating patterns with different lithium-ion battery systems to see if they can hold up.

Not surprisingly, the four-hour battery systems common in today’s market don’t fare well; they miss most of the peaks that the gas peakers met in 2017. Scale up to 6-hour duration batteries, and they meet considerably more of the peaks. Eight-hour storage does even better.

To be exact, 6-hour storage hits 74 percent of the peaks met by the four peakers in 2017. Eight-hour storage hits 90 percent, and 10-hour storage gets 97 percent.

Those are historical simulations; in real use, grid operators won’t know exactly how long they’ll need their peaking resources.

But the opportunity here is striking: six-hour and eight-hour batteries, which are rapidly entering commercial deployment, could stand in for almost all the starts by peakers that follow median operating behavior. That doesn’t build in any assumptions about breakthroughs in longer-duration storage.

This suggests a new paradigm for peak capacity: storage picks off the peaker roles that fire up least frequently and for the shortest bursts. As batteries take on more of this role, grid operators can maintain gas resources for those prolonged peaks that batteries would not meet. Demand side resources, meanwhile, could tackle those peaks to reduce the amount of generation that’s actually required.

How much business can storage seize?

The operational case studies show that properly sized batteries can step in for gas combustion turbines in most circumstances.

How big a market is this, and how much of it could storage reasonably compete for?

Wood Mackenzie predicts 20 gigawatts of new peakers will fire up in the next 10 years, with most of that coming on the back end of the decade.

Assuming that new capacity follows similar runtimes as existing capacity, the base-case projection sees four-hour storage competing cost-effectively with peakers that run less than four hours on average. That amounts to 6.4 gigawatts representing 32 percent of the new peaker capacity over the next 10 years; most of that opportunity lies in California, Texas and Arizona.

Keep in mind that GTM Research expects the U.S. to deploy only 550 megawatts of storage across all applications this year.

In the aggressive case, though, eight-hour storage becomes economically viable and competes for 82 percent of the new capacity, or 13.1 gigawatts, within the next 10 years.

What’s this mean for everything else?

These are high-level findings; there will be much more messiness in the real-world rollout, where storage will have to compete case by case in markets with wildly different rules and regulations.

In some states, utilities already evaluate storage as a potential peaking resource; in others, the technology plays no meaningful role in grid planning.

What’s clear is that gas is no longer the only game in town. It will retain dominance for plants that routinely run longer than eight hours, but the plants that fire up for short bursts definitely have some new competition. That will likely affect the outlook for new peaker additions.

The data also suggest that utilities building new peaker plants in the coming years should at least scrutinize battery pricing. It might not win out just yet, but it could get close. If the utility can use the storage plant for other grid services outside of peak events, the economics should be even more favorable.