Battery Metals

Electric vehicles are starting to gain traction in communities as steps towards providing cleaner alternatives for automotive are being prioritized. Last year was a good year for the electric vehicles sector, with sales 25 percent higher compared to 2016 numbers.

Clean energy experts over at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) say 2018 will be even better. BNEF chief editor Angus McCrone notes that the trend of declining renewable energy prices in 2017 will continue this 2018. On the other hand, oil and coal prices will improve along with the global economic recovery, according to Forbes. While oil and coal will still be the leading energy sources, environment-friendly vehicles will be more competitive this year thanks to the growing support for renewable energy.

The clean energy sector will see around $333.5 billion in investments this year. However, compared to last year, more markets for clean energy will open up. BNEF’s Jenny Chase notes that China will still spearhead the sector, dominating half of the market. Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East will play significant roles as well.

Sales and investments

China is also one of the leaders in electric vehicle sales. EV sales are expected to grow 40 percent this year, which is about 1.5 million units; half of those units will be sold in China. In the US, there are 300,000 units projected to be sold. This figure could be a lot higher if Tesla meets its production goal within the year.

Investments made for electric vehicles this 2018 are already up to $90 billion, according to Reuters. Ford Motors Co. recently doubled its spending, and that number is expected to grow with key players like Tesla and Nissan pushing for electric vehicles.

The country that invested most in electric vehicles is Germany with $52 billion, followed by China with $21 billion and the US with $19 billion. Continued investments will allow for more affordable and accessible electric vehicles this 2018.

The electric cars to look out for

CNN reports that better electric vehicles are on the horizon as well—ones that can last through a person’s daily transportation needs—thanks to developments by key players in the sector such as Tesla, Chevrolet, GM, and Nissan.

An electric vehicle to look out for is the Chevrolet Bolt EV, which will be made available in all US states this year. The electric vehicle has sold more than 20,000 units last year despite being available in select states only. The price of the Chevrolet Bolt EV starts at $37,000, and its batteries can run for as long as 238 miles.

Moreover, Electrek reports that the Tesla Model 3 is seeing a push in production after the Elon Musk-owned company produced less than 300 units last year. For now, Tesla is working on a dual-motor version of its latest electric vehicle, which is expected to run longer than the standard version released last year.

As electric vehicles are becoming more prominent, we can expect more car manufacturers to look into the production of this alternative. It can be the cheaper option for drivers, but most importantly, it’s a better option for the environment.

Coordination complex reveals why rare-earth elements give methanol dehydrogenase enzyme a boost

Ten years ago, in a steaming volcanic mudpot in Italy, microbiologists discovered a bizarre bacterium—the first known organism that couldn’t live without lanthanides. To help it feed on methane, Methylacidiphilum fumariolicum relies on a methanol dehydrogenase (MDH) enzyme that has a rare-earth element such as cerium or lanthanum at its heart.

Now, Eric J. Schelter of the University of Pennsylvania has made a complex that mimics the enzyme’s active site, shedding light on the lanthanide’s crucial role in the microbe’s metabolism

Lanthanide ions have very poor bioavailability, because they tend to precipitate out of neutral water. But in the hot, acidic conditions of the Solfatara volcanic crater on the outskirts of Naples, hardy microbes have access to a rare-earth smorgasbord at concentrations of 2–3 µM. Indeed, M. fumariolicum depends on a supply of lanthanides to thrive (Environ. Microbiol. 2013, DOI: 10.1111/1462-2920.12249). “I remember when I first heard about this, and I was just stunned,” says Rachel N. Austin of Barnard College, a metalloprotein expert who was not involved in the research.

MDH converts methanol into formaldehyde, a key step in methane metabolism. The enzyme contains a pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ) cofactor, which is normally bound to a calcium ion. In M. fumariolicum, though, X-ray crystallography has shown that a lanthanide ion takes calcium’s place.

To understand exactly how the lanthanide-MDH works, Schelter’s team developed a model compound that was much easier to manipulate than the enzyme itself. PQQ can bind to metal ions in many different ways, so the researchers created a more obedient stand-in without pyrrole or carboxylic acid groups, and with bulky cyclohexyl groups, to ensure it coordinated with a lanthanum ion in the right way. The resulting complex converted a benzyl alcohol—a convenient substitute for methanol—into its aldehyde and did so catalytically with the help of additional oxidant and base.

Density functional theory calculations based on the model complex helped the team to figure out the reaction mechanism, which involved a hydride transfer step. Schelter says that the lanthanum ion lowers the activation barriers to key intermediates in the mechanism, because it is better at accepting electron pairs from the ligand than calcium. “The bug is getting something better out of using the rare earths,” he says.

Austin says that model studies like this can help to address a fundamental question in biology: Do enzymes simply adopt the most available metal ions, or is nature more selective than that? Schelter’s model suggests that using a lanthanide in MDH, rather than calcium, could have given the mudpot bacteria an evolutionary advantage.

Meanwhile, M. fumariolicum is no longer unique. Last year, studies on water samples from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 suggested that microbes feasting on methane released during the disaster had been using lanthanide-MDH (Sci. Rep. 2017, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-11060-z). Even leaf-dwelling bacteria found on the campus of San Jose State University apparently use lanthanum with their MDH (Science 2015, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa9091). “The microbiologists are finding these things everywhere,” Schelter says. “I think we’re just at the beginning of this story.”

A report by climate change policy think tanks Sandbag and Agora Energiewende shows that renewables generated more energy than coal in 2017.

According to their calculations, renewables as a whole were up from 29.8% to 30% of the EU’s energy mix in 2017. Hydroelectricity was the only green source that was down, at 9.1% from 10.9% in 2016. The numbers come from EUROSTAT and estimates modelled on ENTSO-E monthly and hourly data.

Out of the three renewable sources that did see growth, biomass saw the least at only 3%, which equates to another 5 terawatt hours in production. Wind saw the biggest increase at 19%, with solar at 8%.

For the last three years Germany and the UK are responsible for 56% of the growth in the renewables sector, the report said. Another trend was western Europe slowly phasing out coal, with the east keeping their plants.

The NGOs estimate that EU carbon emissions will remain unchanged for the power sector, and a rise for the region as a whole. The report identified the EU’s cap-and-trade system, the Emissions Trading Scheme, as ineffective, saying that it was not fit for purpose due to the ‘cap’ in the cap-and-trade of emissions being 9% higher than actual emissions in 2017.

Nuclear fusion for the controlled and regular generation of electric power by converting hydrogen into helium and reproducing on a small scale what happens within stars is one of the foremost technological promises for coming decades. So far, only limited results have been achieved in laboratory experiments. Now, a prototype reactor called ITER is under construction in southern France. Its design capacity is for 500 megawatts, and the plan is to go live in 2025. The members of the ITER consortium are China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The cost of the megaproject is expected to surpass €20 billion.

ITER will not capture the energy it produces as electricity, but it will be the first tokamak to produce net energy, i.e., more power than the amount of thermal energy injected to heat the plasma. It will enable scientists to learn more about handling the multiple technical complexities of nuclear fusion, paving the way for machines that use it to supply electricity to the grid. The term tokamak comes from the Russian acronym for a toroidal chamber with magnetic coils.

It will be crucial to ensure that the nuclear fusion process can become self-sustaining and to prevent losses of energy via electromagnetic radiation and alpha particles,as these losses would allow the reactor to cool. Experimental results observed during the past 20 years have shown that the way in which fast ions (including alpha particles) are ejected from the plasma varies greatly from one tokamak to another. Until recently, no one understood which experimental conditions determined this behavior.

The problem has now been elucidated by Vinícius Njaim Duarte, a young Brazilian researcher. Duarte is currently engaged in postdoctoral research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in the US. He is the lead author of the article, titled “Theory and observation of the onset of nonlinear structures due to eigenmode destabilization by fast ions in tokamaks,” published in the Journal Physics of Plasmas.

Duarte’s research drew so much attention that researchers at the largest U.S. tokamak, DIII-D, conducted experiments to test the model he proposed. The results confirmed the model’s predictions.

Physicist Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão said, “Electromagnetic waves excited by fast particles in tokamaks can display sudden variations in frequency, known as chirping. No one understood why this happened on some machines and not in others. Using complex numerical modeling and experimental data, Duarte showed that whether chirping occurs or not—and hence the nature of particle and energy losses—depends on the level of turbulence in the plasma confined in the tokamak. Nuclear fusion reactions take place in this plasma. Chirping occurs if it isn’t highly turbulent. With severe turbulence, there’s no chirping.”

Nuclear fusion is distinct from nuclear fission, the process used in the world’s existing nuclear power plants. In fission, the atomic nuclei of heavy elements such as uranium 235 split into nuclei of lighter elements—krypton and barium, in this case. This fission releases energy, electromagnetic radiation, and neutrons that in turn split in a chain reaction that keeps the process going.

In nuclear fusion, the atomic nuclei of lighter elements such as the hydrogen isotopes deuterium (one proton and one neutron) and tritium (one proton and two neutrons) fuse to form nuclei of heavier elements—in this case, helium (two protons and two neutrons)—and release energy.

“For nuclear fusion to be possible, it’s necessary to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between positive ions,” Galvão explained. “This only happens if the plasma formed by the nuclei of the light elements is heated to extremely high temperatures, on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius.”

At ITER, for example, 840 cubic meters of plasma are heated to 150 million degrees Celsius, over ten times the temperature of the sun’s core. “At that kind of temperature, you reach energy break-even. The energy released by the fusion reactions is sufficient to equal the energy required to heat the plasma,” Galvão said.

The process takes place in the toroidal chamber inside the tokamak. A torus is shaped like a doughnut. The solid contained by the surface is known as a toroid.

The nuclear fusion process develops as follows: A vacuum is produced in the chamber, which is then filled with gas. An electric discharge ionizes the gas, which is heated by high-frequency radio waves. An electrical field induced in the toroidal chamber subjects the gas to an extremely intense current (approximately 1 million amperes, in the case of DIII-D), which heats the gas even further via the Joule effect. Still more energy is injected by electromagnetic waves until the temperature required to trigger nuclear fusion is reached. Even a small tokamak, such as the one installed at the University of São Paulo, reaches temperatures on the order of 100 million degrees.

“At these extremely high temperatures, the ions vibrate so strongly that they collide and overcome electrostatic repulsion,” Galvão said. “A powerful magnetic field confines the plasma flow and keeps it away from the vessel’s walls. The highly energized alpha particles [helium nuclei] collide with other particles in the plasma, keeping it hot and sustaining the fusion reaction.”

An analogy suggested by Galvão would be a bonfire made with damp wood, which will not catch fire easily at first but which flares up eventually after a certain temperature is reached, and the steadily more stable combustion produces enough energy to overcome the humidity. Plasma reaches the ignition point when alpha particles begin consistently feeding back into the process.

Among fusion’s many advantages over fission is the fact that fusion involves a self-control mechanism: Once the ignition point is reached, if this temperature level is significantly exceeded—in other words, if the plasma overheats—the reaction automatically slows down. Thus, reactor meltdown, one of the most dangerous complications of accidents in power plants that use nuclear fission, could not happen in a nuclear fusion plant.

The problem is that resonant interaction between alpha particles and waves present in the plasma can excite electromagnetic oscillations, or even lead to the ejection of alpha particles. This can cause energy loss, plasma cooling and possible interruption of nuclear fusion. Understanding the causes of this problem and the factors that can prevent it is fundamental to ensuring the sustainability of the process and the use of nuclear fusion as a viable source of electricity.

“What Duarte found is that this outcome happens in a self-organized manner, with the production of chirping, if the plasma is not very turbulent. If turbulence is high, however, it doesn’t,” Galvão said [see below for an interview with Vinícius Njaim Duarte].

The crux of the problem is that in a highly turbulent fluid, there is no preferential direction, Galvão explained, offering another analogy to help illustrate his meaning.

“When you heat water slowly, you create a convection cell in the container. Hot water rises, and cold water sinks. This continues until all the water reaches boiling point,” he said. “The medium then becomes turbulent, the convection cell is destroyed, and the energy spreads indiscriminately in all directions. This also happens in magnetically confined plasma. Its occurrence prevents the creation of a self-organized system that sustains an undesirable associated electromagnetic wave. There isn’t enough coherence for waves to be generated. So the loss of energy that would end the fusion process doesn’t occur.

“Duarte had already published a paper on this model during his Ph.D. research, but no one had performed an experiment to control the level of turbulence and see if the model applied or not. This has now been conducted by General Atomics at DIII-D, specifically in order to test the model, which was proven by the result.”

Experimental physicists already knew empirically how to induce higher or lower turbulence, but they did not know this would affect the spectral nature of waves associated with the particle structure. Duarte’s contribution consists of identifying the key control mechanism and explaining why. In terms of technological applications, this establishes optimal turbulence—enough to prevent self-organized particle and energy loss, but not enough to have other undesirable effects on overall plasma confinement.

Until now, tokamaks have been used on the laboratory scale. ITER will be the first prototype of a tokamak capable of generating electricity efficiently by nuclear fusion. The use of controlled nuclear fusion is not uncontroversial, but according to its advocates, it is safe, can produce a practically unlimited amount of power, and does not create radioactive waste, as do fission reactors.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd, or CATL, already sells the most batteries to the biggest electric-vehicle makers in the biggest EV market: China. Now it wants to use proceeds from a pending initial public offering backed by Goldman Sachs to get under the hoods of more European marques and secure customers in the US.

The company plans to raise 13.1 billion yuan (US$2 billion) as soon as this year by selling a 10 per cent stake, at a valuation of about US$20 billion. The share sale would finance construction of a battery-cell plant second in size only to Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada – big enough to cement China as the leader in the technology replacing gas-guzzling engines.

The new assembly lines would quintuple CATL’s production capability and make it the world’s largest electric-vehicle battery cell manufacturer, ahead of Tesla, Warren Buffett-backed BYD in China and South Korea’s LG Chem, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The factory could go fully online as soon as 2020, an opportune time as China targets a sevenfold increase in new-energy vehicle sales by 2025 and ponders a course for phasing out fossil-fuel vehicles altogether.

“China, unabashedly, wants to be the Detroit of electric vehicles,” said Anthony Milewski, a managing director at Pala Investments, a Zug, Switzerland-based fund investing in the EV supply chain. “There is no question in my mind that they are going to lead the world in capacity and, eventually, in the technology.”

China’s government likes to have national champions of industry: think Alibaba Group Holding in e-commerce and Tencent Holdings in social media. So far no carmakers are part of that conversation, although CATL is working its way in there by capitalising on China’s push for cleaner air and fewer oil imports. The rising battery giant is, in no small part, a manifestation of China’s aggressive government support for electric vehicles.

China surpassed the US in 2015 to become the world’s biggest market for electric cars. Sales of new-energy vehicles – including battery-powered, plug-in hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles – reached 777,000 units last year and could surpass 1 million this year, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers estimated.

China expected to extend electric vehicle tax rebate

In China, the source of 99 per cent of CATL’s business, the company’s lithium-ion batteries will be inside locally made EVs from Volkswagen, BMW, and Hyundai Motor. Japan’s Toyota Motor, Honda Motor and Nissan Motor are considering CATL batteries for planned China-made vehicles. Domestic companies using the batteries include BAIC Motor Corp, the biggest EV seller in China, and Zhengzhou Yutong Group, the world’s biggest bus maker.

CATL is already in the midst of expanding overseas. Last year, it spent €30 million (US$35 million then) to acquire 22 per cent of Finland’s Valmet Automotive, a contract manufacturer for Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz and supplier to Porsche and Volkswagen’s Lamborghini. CATL also added offices in Paris to existing facilities across Germany.

Now CATL is making another leap. Job ads for positions in the Detroit area have appeared on LinkedIn, and the company said in an email it is meeting with several US carmakers to discuss partnerships.

“Their intentions are very clear,” said Simon Moores, London-based managing director of battery sector consultant Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “To not just be China’s biggest battery producer but the world’s largest.”

Ningde doesn’t look like a global foundry for the key technology inside the cars of the future. The isolated city is surrounded by mountains, with a long history of fishing and farming that has more recently made way for a few Starbucks and McDonald’s locations. Chinese President Xi Jinping apprenticed there as a Communist Party chief in the 1980s, when Ningde was the poorest city on China’s east coast.

Menahem Anderman, president of Total Battery Consulting in Petaluma, California, went to see CATL’s headquarters for himself in January and found a company in the process of becoming a world-class battery maker. “Technically they are a probably a tad behind the big three,” he said, citing Panasonic, Samsung SDI and LG Chem. “But considering how fast they have been moving, it’s reasonable to assume that in two to three years they’ll have a technically similar product.”

The new battery plant is set to rise on landfilled mudflats across a lake from CATL’s sprawling headquarters. The entire complex, all barely seven years old, is vast enough that it takes half an hour to walk from an office building on the northwest corner to a gate on the east side. Six electric shuttle buses, all powered by CATL batteries, trundle employees between dormitories, factories and research labs. For the 90-minute trip to the nearest airport in Fuzhou, employees can book free chauffeured rides in a Zinoro hybrid built by BMW’s joint venture and powered by CATL batteries.

Zeng Yuqun, the 49-year-old engineer who founded CATL, is often seen walking fast across the campus. He was born in a mountain village an hour away and sometimes organises employee excursions to his birthplace. For most of his career, he worked on lithium-ion batteries for consumer electronics, including the iPhone, at Amperex Technology Co, or ATL, a subsidiary of Japan’s TDK Corp, that he helped found.

Zeng’s decision to start CATL in 2011, while he was president of ATL, marked a gamble on the direction of Chinese government policy. That year there were just 1,014 alternative-energy vehicles sold in China, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. He was essentially betting that the lithium-ion battery business for cars would flourish, creating a replica of ATL focused on a vehicle market that barely existed. (The two companies split in 2015, with ATL transferring its 15 per cent stake in the new company to other investors; Zeng resigned from TDK and ATL last year.)

Zeng’s prediction proved right: Xi’s administration now provides generous incentives for consumers buying non-gasoline vehicles. In 2016 and 2017, those subsidies may have totalled 83 billion yuan, according to an estimate from Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of the China Passenger Car Association.

Carmakers seeking to qualify choose domestic battery suppliers because of concerns that models built with foreign brands will be ineligible, even though there isn’t a written rule banning non-Chinese suppliers. “The premise is that locally produced cars in China are obligated to use local batteries,” Jochem Heizmann, chief executive of Volkswagen Group China, said in January.

Zeng, who declined to comment for this article, can be blunt about the electric-vehicle business. During a forum in China last year, he made it clear that he doesn’t see himself in competition with other battery supplies. “We are competing with gasoline cars,” he said. “If we can’t win against gasoline cars, there’s no place for us in the market.”

If CATL made itself into an emerging battery giant on the strength of Chinese policy, Zeng already appears worried about securing a future without that help. In April, he sent an internal email meant to motivate his employees. The title of his letter posed a question: “When the typhoon comes, can pigs really fly?”

Zeng proceeded to use an allegory to caution workers against complacency. “Is the pig really flying? What happened to the pig after the typhoon is gone?” he wrote, according to the company’s WeChat account. The pig is the company, the strong winds are government subsidies, and the danger is that favourable policies won’t always be there to provide uplift.

CATL reaps further benefits from an aggressive government policy to acquire the minerals needed for battery makers. China is securing supplies of key materials such as lithium, nickel and rare earths, and its mining companies are estimated to be responsible for 62 per cent of the global supply of cobalt, the Cleveland-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said in a January report.

The upcoming IPO should propel CATL to become the biggest lithium-ion battery cell maker in the world. The company previously forecast sales of as much as 100 billion yuan by 2020, a huge jump from 14.9 billion yuan in its last full-year earnings from 2016. The company’s ramp-up, in turn, will extend China’s grip on global battery production to about 70 per cent of the market by 2021, up from 54 per cent last year, according to BNEF.

That startling growth has some overseas origins. “Their technological background and procedures are quite good, partly because they have some history with a Japanese company,” said Mark Newman, a senior research analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein in Hong Kong.

There’s also German engineering in its DNA. In 2011, CATL was chosen by BMW and local partner Brilliance China Automotive Holdings to supply their domestic premium EV brand, Zinoro.

Last year, the German carmaker hosted a coming-out party for its plug-in hybrid model, the 60H, amid coconut trees on the resort island of Hainan. Johann Wieland, president of the Chinese joint venture, and Zeng stood side-by-side to pose for photos with the silver model.

“We have learned a lot from BMW, and now we have become one of the top battery manufacturers globally,” Zeng said at the event. “The high standards and demands from BMW have helped us to grow fast.”

Helping power the growth is a strong research-and-development effort, said Zhou Lei, a Tokyo-based partner covering the auto industry for Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting. CATL has ties to institutes in Germany and State College, Pennsylvania, according to its website.

CATL spent 670 million yuan on research during the first half of last year, or about 11 per cent of revenue, according to its prospectus. BYD, China’s largest maker of NEVs, spent 2.76 billion yuan, or 6 per cent of revenue, according to the company.

Research-and-development staff comprise a fifth of CATL’s 18,000-plus workforce, and the company plans to use 4.2 billion yuan from the IPO to develop next-generation batteries, it said.

The share sale, which suggests a valuation of about US$20 billion, would potentially make CATL one of the biggest listed companies on China’s Nasdaq-style ChiNext board. That valuation would surpass carmakers Kia Motors, Mazda Motor and some its Chinese customers. Rival BYD is valued at about US$27 billion.

CATL may host a road show later this year. The underwriters include Goldman Sachs and CSC Financial Co.

When completed, the new 24 gigawatt-hour factory will catapult CATL to the top of the manufacturing capacity rankings. Currently, it has 17.5 gigawatt hours a year in capacity either in operation or about to come online. A gigawatt hour is the equivalent of 1 million kilowatt hours of electricity – about enough to power 1 million homes for an hour.

The factory will boost that total to 41.5 gigawatt hours, surpassing LG Chem’s production, BNEF said in a November report. By comparison, Tesla’s Gigafactory will have a capacity for 35 gigawatt hours.

“Their ambitions are 100 per cent global, and I believe they are going to be global competitors,” said Milewski, who’s also chairman of Toronto-based Cobalt 27 Capital Corp. “You have the Chinese government behind them, and you have some of the smartest people in the world working there.”

The next global powerhouse in the auto industry comes from a small city in a tea-growing province of southeast China, where an unheralded maker of electric-vehicle batteries is planning a $1.3 billion factory with enough capacity to surpass the output of Tesla and dwarf the suppliers for battery-powered cars by GM, Nissan and Audi.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd., or CATL, already sells the most batteries to the biggest electric-vehicle makers in the biggest EV market: China. Now it wants to use proceeds from a pending initial public offering backed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to get under the hoods of more European marques and secure customers in the U.S.

The company plans to raise 13.1 billion yuan ($2 billion) as soon as this year by selling a 10 percent stake, at a valuation of about $20 billion. The share sale would finance construction of a battery-cell plant second in size only to Tesla Inc.’s Gigafactory in Nevada—big enough to cement China as the leader in the technology replacing gas-guzzling engines.

The new assembly lines would quintuple CATL’s production capability and make it the world’s largest electric-vehicle battery cell manufacturer, ahead of Tesla, Warren Buffett-backed BYD Co. in China and South Korea’s LG Chem Ltd., according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The factory could go fully online as soon as 2020, an opportune time as China targets a sevenfold increase in new-energy vehicle sales by 2025 and ponders a course for phasing out fossil-fuel vehicles altogether.

“China, unabashedly, wants to be the Detroit of electric vehicles,” said Anthony Milewski, a managing director at Pala Investments Ltd., a Zug, Switzerland-based fund investing in the EV supply chain. “There is no question in my mind that they are going to lead the world in capacity and, eventually, in the technology.”

China’s government likes to have national champions of industry: think Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. in e-commerce and Tencent Holdings Ltd. in social media. So far no carmakers are part of that conversation, although CATL is working its way in there by capitalizing on China’s push for cleaner air and fewer oil imports. The rising battery giant is, in no small part, a manifestation of China’s aggressive government support for electric vehicles.

China surpassed the U.S. in 2015 to become the world’s biggest market for electric cars. Sales of new-energy vehicles—including battery-powered, plug-in hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles—reached 777,000 units last year and could surpass 1 million this year, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers estimated.

In China, the source of 99 percent of CATL’s business, the company’s lithium-ion batteries will be inside locally made EVs from Volkswagen AG, BMW AG, and Hyundai Motor Co. Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. are considering CATL batteries for planned China-made vehicles. Domestic companies using the batteries include BAIC Motor Corp., the biggest EV seller in China, and Zhengzhou Yutong Group Co., the world’s biggest bus maker.

CATL is already in the midst of expanding overseas. Last year, it spent 30 million euros ($35 million then) to acquire 22 percent of Finland’s Valmet Automotive Oy, a contract manufacturer for Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz and supplier to Porsche AG and Volkswagen’s Lamborghini. CATL also added offices in Paris to existing facilities across Germany. The company has a partnership with BMW’s motorsport teams for races in Europe and Macau, splashing its blue logo across the carmaker’s M6 GT3.

Now CATL is making another leap. Job ads for positions in the Detroit area have appeared on LinkedIn, and the company said in an email it is meeting with several U.S. carmakers to discuss partnerships.

“Their intentions are very clear,” said Simon Moores, London-based managing director of battery sector consultant Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “To not just be China’s biggest battery producer but the world’s largest.”