Battery Metals

The crazy dream of a flow battery electric car really is not so crazy after all. Last year, the European tech firm nanoFlowcell set up a US office to pitch its new QUANTiNO twentyfive electric car featuring new flow battery technology, and now the company is hatching plans for a whole US flow battery ecosystem to produce the fluids that make flow batteries flow.

The Flow Battery Electric Car Of The Future Is Already Here

Flow batteries work on the principle that two specialized fluids can generate electricity when they flow adjacent to each other, separated only by a thin membrane. The liquids are stored in separate tanks until called into use.

Compared to lithium-ion batteries, the advantages of flow batteries for an electric car include non-toxicity, inflammability, longer range, and shorter fueling time. However, that’s not as simple as it may sound.

Flow batteries are not particularly new, but earlier versions tended to be far too large to fit into a car due to their low energy density. Recent improvements in energy density have created an opening for flow batteries in the long duration energy storage market for stationary applications. However, downsizing them for mobility has seemed far off in the future (see more flow battery coverage here).

Still, science loves a challenge, and researchers have been steadily chipping away at the energy density issue. Small-scale flow batteries are already appearing on the horizon for home energy storage applications, and now here comes nanoFlowcell with its new electric car.

A New Electric Car For The USA

Back in 2019, CleanTechnica reporter Jennifer Sensiba took note of NFC’s QUANTiNO test vehicle, noting that “a good flow battery shouldn’t degrade very quickly, and may go for tens of thousands of hours before needing any parts replaced.”

By that time, the electric car had already been driven for 10,000 hours and almost 220,000 miles. “The vehicle’s flow battery showed no signs of damage to the membrane or the pumps, and didn’t seem to have suffered any wear at all,” Sensiba reported.

In the test car, the tanks holding the electrolyte fluid were stashed in the trunk. Several years and some pandemic-related delays later, the latest version of the QUANTiNO electric car is ready to roll, with tanks built into the body itself and a driving range of up to 2,000 kilometers (almost 1,242 miles) on a single fuel-up.

In December of 2022, NFC announced the creation of a US subsidiary of the same name, to be headquartered in New York City. Apparently the electric car is only part of the plan, which also includes stationary energy storage and robotics.

“The tasks of the US branch of the Swiss-originating research and development company are the adaptation of the nanoFlowcell® flow cell technology to US-specific applications as well as the development of new market-specific nanoFlowcell® applications,” the company explained.

Still, the car is front and center. Several cars, from the looks of it. The US branch is tasked with laying plans for “series production of the QUANT E-models as well as the construction of a large-scale bi-ION® production facility,” the company stated.

Last June, NFC also showed off its QUANTiNO twentyfive signature model at the exclusive Top Marques supercar show in Monaco. The car is “powered by a nanoFlowcell flow cell system, using clean energy from regenerative power sources stored in the nanoFlowcell’s proprietary electrolyte liquid bi-ION,” the company explained.

Ummm…What Is This Stuff?

As for what bi-ION is, that’s a good question. It’s basically saltwater, but not just ordinary saltwater.

NFC explains that the production process starts with an energy efficient water purification step that avoids stressing potable water resources. It can be used on seawater or even heavily polluted wastewater.

The purified water is then treated with both metallic and non-metallic salts. The secret sauce is the proprietary bi-ION molecule, which NFC describes as a “specifically designed energy carrier.”

“The charge carrier we’ve pioneered enables a significantly higher concentration compared to prior electrolytes in conventional flow cells,” NFC explains. “Unlike the massive electrolyte tanks found in stationary systems, which often span thousands of litre, our QUANTiNO 48VOLT achieves equivalent performance with a tank volume comparable to that of a standard car.”

That’s still not giving away much, but the proof is in the pudding. NFC claims an energy density of 600 watt-hours, providing for five times the range of a comparable electric vehicle with lithium-ion batteries.

China’s EV battery developer Gotion High-Tech continues its global expansion, celebrating its latest milestone in new technologies this month. Gotion rolled its first battery pack off its new assembly line near Silicon Valley – its first product manufactured in the United States.

Gotion High-Tech Co., Ltd. specializes in battery R&D and energy solutions. It was founded and headquartered in China but continues to expand production to new territories worldwide. For example, the company is in the process of expanding to Vietnam via a joint venture with VinES – the energy division of VinFast.

This past year, we saw Gotion roll a battery off an assembly line in the university town of Göttingen, Germany – its first product assembled in Europe. This year also saw the company purchase a 25% stake in the Slovak EV battery startup InoBat – the first investment in a European startup by any Chinese battery maker.

Aside from Southeast Asia and Europe, Gotion has begun expanding its battery operations in the US, establishing an assembly facility in Fremont, California, and plans for a $2 billion EV battery plant in Illinois, announced this past September.

While that plant is being established, Gotion has hit a milestone at its California facility, manufacturing portable power packs under its GenDome brand.

Gotion begins US battery ESS production

Per news directly from Gotion High-Tech, it completed the first build of its battery pack product in Fremont on December 21 as part of its “Made in USA” initiative that dates back to 2014, when the company first established an R&D footprint near Silicon Valley.

Gotion’s GenDome energy storage system (seen above) is also the first product built specifically for the US market, kicking off an incoming lineup of portable energy and residential energy storage products with capacities ranging from 3 to 30 kWh.

Looking ahead, Gotion’s Fremont location will continue to serve as its innovation hub to support its other incoming facilities in Michigan and Illinois. Gotion SVP and president of Gotion Americas Business, Li Chen, spoke:

For the past decade, we have consistently adhered to a three-in-one strategy featuring localized research & development, localized manufacturing, and localized marketing. From the initial development of battery management systems to the present battery factory, we have encountered numerous challenges and tests. Today, we have made a name for ourselves in the Americas market, and with the help of the Illinois battery factory and Michigan material factory, Gotion will work together with customers to build a localized and diversified supply chain system characterized by a full value chain.

Gotion’s Fremont battery pack factory is expected to reach a production capacity of 1 GWh and operate assembly lines led by 85% automation.

Chile’s President Gabriel Boric hailed the formation of a new government-controlled lithium partnership that fuses assets of state-run Codelco with private miner SQM, as the leftist leader advances his push for greater public control over the battery metal.

Chilean lithium miner SQM SQMA.SN said on Wednesday it would partner with copper giant Codelco for the future development and production of the metal in the Atacama salt flat, in a tie-up set to kick off in 2025 and run through 2060.

The deal gives Codelco majority control in line with the president’s plans announced in April to strengthen state control of lithium to generate more broad-based benefits from surging demand and to allow only public-private partnerships to participate in its exploitation.

“This is an unprecedented milestone in Chile’s mining industry and a concrete step towards achieving fair and sustainable development,” Boric said in a televised address praising the public-private venture.

For much of the year, the firms had been locked in talks over the future of lithium mining and production in the salt flat, located in Chile’s north and the home to 90% of the nation’s lithium reserves. The South American country has the world’s largest proven lithium reserves.

As part of the memorandum of understanding announced on Wednesday, both firms agreed to form a new public-private partnership company in which copper miner Codelco will have a 50% plus one share stake that will begin a first phase of operations in January 2025, the companies said in statements.

Both companies said the agreement would facilitate a “transition” between SQM’s current lease, which expires at the end of 2030, and Codelco’s lease over the same area that runs from 2031 to 2060.

The new company will be responsible for the production of lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide – the two main processed lithium products used to make rechargeable batteries – on the properties that SQM currently leases from Chile’s state development office, SQM said.

SQM said it would provide the fixed assets, knowledge and employees from its lithium business, while Codelco would contribute the lease and an additional production and sales quota.

“This is a significant milestone in public-private partnerships in Chile,” SQM CEO Ricardo Ramos said in a statement.

As part of the deal, Codelco will provide the sales authorization for an additional 165,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) to be used by 2031.

Codelco will also authorize an additional 135,000 tons of LCE for the new public-private entity during its initial phase, but conditioned on increased production, according to the SQM statement.

LG Chem is building a $3 billion battery cathode factory for electric vehicles in Tennessee – here’s the latest.

December 27: The groundbreaking ceremony took place last week for LG Chem’s battery cathode factory. Some of the company’s original plans have changed since I last reported on this announcement.

The factory was initially supposed to break ground in Q1 2023 and start mass production in the second half of 2025. So, the groundbreaking is nearly a year late, and the production launch is now date is now “starting from 2026.”

LG Chem originally said it would produce 120,000 tons of cathode material annually by 2027 – enough to power batteries in 1.2 million EVs with a range of 310 miles per charge.

But it’s now saying that the plant will be “capable of producing cathode materials for approximately 600,000 high-performance pure electric vehicles” annually – that’s half the original production plan.

However, the company says it will “expand production capacity in response to increasing demand.”

In October, LG Chem signed a North American cathode material supply contract with Toyota worth $2.5 billion.

November 22, 2022: LG Chem announced that it signed a memorandum of understanding with the state of Tennessee to build a $3 billion cathode factory for electric vehicles.

The new plant, which will be sited in Clarksville, will be the largest of its kind in the US. It will sit on 420 acres and is expected to produce 120,000 tons of cathode material annually by 2027. That’s enough to power batteries in 1.2 million EVs with a range of 310 miles per charge.

LG Chem said it chose Tennessee because of its proximity to key customers, ease of transporting raw materials, and cooperation from state and local governments.

It also cites the passage of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as a catalyst for the new factory, which will see the creation of 850 jobs.

LG Chem said that the Tennessee site will function as a supply chain hub, where material and recycling partners work together to supply global customers such as Tesla and GM.

The Clarksville factory will produce advanced NCMA – nickel, cobalt, manganese, aluminum – cathode materials for next-gen EV batteries with improved battery capacity and stability.

NCMA cathode materials are among the most critical ingredients for determining the battery capacity and life of electric vehicles. The company’s battery recycling partner is Li-Cycle.

The Tennessee plant will feature LG Chem’s most advanced production technology, including the ability to produce more than 10,000 tons of cathode material per line. LG Chem has already successfully applied this technology in its cathode factory in Cheongju, South Korea.

The company also plans to utilize its smart factory technology in Tennessee to automate the entire production process and establish a quality analysis and control system.

Construction of the factory will begin in the first quarter of 2023, with mass production to start in the second half of 2025. LG Chem says the new factory will run completely on solar and hydroelectric power.

The Tennessee site will play a critical role in Seoul-headquartered LG Chem’s strategy to increase its battery materials business, including cathode material fourfold from Korean won ₩5 trillion in 2022 to ₩20 trillion by 2027.

AS SHE DRIVES HER electric vehicle to her mother’s house, Monique’s battery gauge indicates that it’s time to reenergize. She stops at a charging station, taps her credit card at the pump, inserts a nozzle into the car, and in 5 minutes exchanges 400 liters of spent nanofluid for fresher stuff. As she waits, a tanker pulls up to refill the station itself by exchanging tens of thousands of liters of charged for spent fuel. Monique closes her EV’s fueling port and heads onto the highway with enough stored energy to drive 640 kilometers (400 miles).

The battery in her EV is a variation on the flow battery, a design in which spent electrolyte is replaced rather than recharged. Flow batteries are safe, stable, long-lasting, and easily refilled, qualities that suit them well for balancing the grid, providing uninterrupted power, and backing up sources of electricity.

This battery, though, uses a completely new kind of fluid, called a nanoelectrofuel. Compared to a traditional flow battery of comparable size, it can store 15 to 25 as much energy, allowing for a battery system small enough for use in an electric vehicle and energy-dense enough to provide the range and the speedy refill of a gasoline-powered vehicle. It’s the hoped-for civilian spin-off of a project that the Strategic Technology Office of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is pursuing as part of a drive to ease the military’s deployment of all-electric supply vehicles by 2030 and of EV tactical vehicles by 2050.

Using lithium-based batteries would create its own set of problems. You’d need a charging infrastructure, which for the U.S. military would mean deploying one, often in inhospitable places. Then there’s the long charging time; the danger of thermal runaway—that is, fires; the relatively short working life of lithium batteries; and the difficulties of acquiring battery materials and recycling them when the old batteries are no longer any good. A battery that mitigates these problems is DARPA’s objective. The new flow battery seems to hit every mark. If it works, the benefits to the electrification of transportation would be huge.

Flow batteries are safe and long-lived

Nanoelectrofuel batteries are a new take on the reduction-oxidation (redox) flow battery, which was first proposed nearly a century and a half ago. The design returned to life in the mid-20th century, was developed for possible use on a moon base, and was further improved for use in grid storage.

The cell of a flow battery uses two chemical solutions containing ions, one acting as the anolyte (adjacent to the anode), the other as the catholyte (near the cathode). An electrochemical reaction between the two solutions pushes electrons through a circuit. Typical redox flow batteries use ions based on iron chromium or vanadium chemistries; the latter takes advantage of vanadium’s four distinct ionic states.

On the chemical side of the reaction, each solution is continuously pumped into separate sides of a battery cell. Ions pass from one solution to the other by crossing a membrane, which keeps the solutions apart. On the electrical side, current moves from one electrode into an external circuit, circling around before returning to the opposite electrode. The battery can be recharged in two ways: The two solutions can be charged in place by a current moving in the opposite direction, the way conventional batteries are charged, or the spent solutions can be replaced with charged ones.

Besides beating lithium batteries in performance and safety, flow batteries also scale up more easily: If you want to store more energy, just increase the size of the solution storage tanks or the concentration of the solutions. If you want to provide more power, just stack more cells on top of one another or add new stacks.

This scalability makes flow batteries suitable for applications that require as much as 100 megawatts, says Kara Rodby, a technical principal at Volta Energy Technologies, in Naperville, Ill., and an expert in flow batteries. An example, she says, is the task of balancing energy flows in the power grid.

However, conventional flow batteries pack very little energy into a given volume and mass. Their energy density is as little as 10 percent that of lithium-ion batteries. It has to do with the amount of material an aqueous solution can hold, Rodby explains. There is only so much salt you can dissolve in a glass of water.

Therefore, flow batteries have so far been too bulky for most applications. To shrink them enough to fit in electric vehicles, you need to raise their energy density to that of lithium-ion batteries.

Nanoparticles boost flow battery’s energy density

One good way to add capacity to a flow battery is with nanofluids, which hold nanoparticles in suspension. These particles undergo redox reactions at the electrode surface similar to how the dissolved ions react in conventional flow batteries, but the nanofluids are more energy dense. Importantly, the nanofluids are engineered to remain suspended indefinitely, unlike other suspensions—for instance, sand in water. That indefinite suspension helps the particles move through the system and make contact with the electrodes. The particles can compose up to 80 percent of the liquid’s weight while leaving it no more viscous than motor oil.

Nanofluids suspended in water-based electrolytes were first investigated for this application in 2009 by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and the Illinois Institute of Technology. The scientists found the nanofluids could be used in a system with an energy-storing potential approaching that of a lithium-ion battery and with the pumpable recharging of a flow battery. What’s more, the nanoscale particles could be made from readily available, inexpensive minerals, such as ferric oxide and gamma manganese dioxide for the anode and cathode materials, respectively.

Additionally, because the nanoelectrofuel is an aqueous suspension, it did not catch fire or explode, nor would the material be hazardous if the battery were to leak. The battery possessed a wide operational range of between -40 °C and 80 °C.

In 2013, the team received a three-year, US $3.44 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) to build a prototype 1 kilowatt-hour nanoelectrofuel battery. The prototype’s success encouraged several of the principal investigators to spin off a company, called Influit Energy, to commercialize the technology. Through additional government contracts, the startup has continued to improve the components of the technology—the nanoelectrofuel itself, the battery architecture, and the recharging and delivery system.

John Katsoudas, a founder and chief executive of Influit, emphasizes the distinction between his company’s design and a conventional flow battery. “Our novelty is in doing what others have already done [with flow batteries] but doing it with nanofluids,” he says.

With the basic science problem resolved, Katsoudas adds, Influit is now developing a battery with an energy density rated at 550 to 850 watt-hours per kilogram or higher, as compared to 200 to 350 Wh/kg for a standard EV lithium-ion battery. The company expects larger versions would also beat old-style flow batteries at backing up the grid because the nanoelectrofuel can be reused at least as many times as a flow battery—10,000 or more cycles—and it will probably be cheaper.