Battery Metals

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.”

A new partnership between Eco Marine Power (EMP) and the Japanese ship owner Hisafuku Kisen K.K. of Onomichi will test the world’s first integrated rigid sail and solar power system for ships.

Eco Marine Power is a technology-focused company working on ways to introduce renewable energy to the shipping industry. The new solution under development is called Aquarius Marine Renewable Energy, and it will allow ships to make use of solar energy both while in port and while they sail.

The company will combine its EnergySails technology, which includes solar panels mounted on the covers of large bulk carrier ships, with energy storage applications controlled with a computer-based monitoring system.

The rigid sails can be configured with a mix of sensors, not limited to photovoltaic panels. The company states that “other power generation devices” can be applied including wind turbines.

During 2018, the two partners will conduct feasibility studies using multiple large bulk carrier ships in order to estimate the share of energy needs that can be met through solar power during each trip, and the number of solar arrays that can be installed.

Depending on the results of the testing, one ship will be selected for the complete installation of the new system. This specific ship will be monitored for 12 to 18 months to identify the benefits and measure the cost reductions the technology can achieve.

In 2016, European Union figures showed that the maritime transport industry is responsible for more than 1000 million tonnes of carbon annually, accounting for approximately 2.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

However, a ship’s energy consumption could be reduced by up to 75 percent if shipping companies applied existing technologies and operational measures.

This is why the main argument is whether the energy savings renewable energy technologies can offer can attract the industry’s attention- which is what the new innovative system will test.

Greg Atkinson, Chief Technology Officer and Founder of Eco Marine Power, said: “We believe Aquarius MRE will pave the way towards the widespread adoption of renewable energy on ships”.

Further demand for high grade, high purity manganese may be driven by new technology thanks to breakthroughs like the new discovery by researchers that using a nanosheet of manganese dioxide increases the performance of lithium-sulphur batteries significantly.

High grade, high purity manganese is used as a primary cathode material in lithium-ion manganese batteries or NCM batteries. The NCM formulation of batteries is the slated as the next generation of battery cathodes, after the lithium-nickel-cobalt-aluminum design (NCA) battery.

MANGANESE NANO TECH

One of the most promising battery technology breakthroughs comes from the University of Waterloo in Canada, where a team of researchers has found that using a nanosheet of manganese dioxide increases the performance of lithium-sulphur batteries significantly.

This boost has the potential to increase the range of an electric vehicle by up to three times for the same weight of lithium-ion battery.

The study brings the Li-S battery one step closer to realization.

In the model used in the research, the manganese dioxide nanosheet transforms the sulfur cathode used in the LI-S battery into a high-performance cathode capable of recharging over 2000 times.

Sulfur by virtue of its abundance, cheapness, and light weight make for an ideal battery material, but hasn’t worked well because it dissolves easily in electrolyte solution. While there are various methods for stabilizing sulfur including the use of metallic titanium oxide, manganese dioxide nanosheets have been shown in this study to work much better.

This technology has been known since the 19th century, but sulfur science has taken a backseat in that time and this study gives the first real glimmer of hope for sulphur as a cathode material.

TECHNOLOGY DRIVING DEMAND

Industry experts see great applicability of this new technology in the fledging market of electric motorcycles.

Tripling the range of electric motorcycles eliminates one of the primary concerns -limited range- that potential customers harbor over electric motorcycles. If developers are able to extend battery life while keeping costs constant, the acceptance of electric motorcycles will get a huge boost.

And if this new technology goes mainstream, the demand for manganese to support is expected to increase in similar fashion to what has been witnessed with lithium and cobalt since Tesla’s advances.

Currently about 90% of all manganese produced in the world is used in steel production. A potential steep increase in demand for use in EV technology could lead to a sharp upsurge in the price of the metal. Current investment in manganese mining infrastructure may lag behind production demand leading to steep price increases.

MORE DEMAND SPURS MINERS

Maxtech Ventures is a junior miner playing off of the momentum in manganese markets. Maxtech is focused two areas: building a vertical mining operation, selling its manganese into high growth markets focused on renewable energy and crop fertility.

As a Canadian-based mining company, Maxtech has a unique entry point; the company

has secured in excess of 540,000 hectares of potential high-grade manganese claims in Braziland has an agreement to jointly explore manganese-specific projects with Brazil’s Maringá Ferro-Liga S.A.

Brazil is expected to increase its demand for high purity manganese by 4.8% CAGR. That will translate to an additional demand of 227,000 tonnes for use in fertilizers.

It stands to reason that as a local supplier with a major distribution partner, Maxtech should benefit greatly from this demand.

Maxtech has set its sights on a direct opportunity to move to the cash flow stage by tapping the fertilizer market locally immediately, then increasing its resource capacity to answer the growing power cell and storage markets.

NMC IS JUST ONE MORE POSITIVE FOR GREEN ENERGY

While manganese-based batteries are not new to the industry, the model described in the current research can only accelerate demand.

Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide (NMC) already form a major segment of batteries used in EVs. Tesla recently signed a five-year agreement with NMC battery researcher Dr. Jeff Dahn to help improve the technology and bring costs down. The EV divisions of other major car makers such as BMW, Chevrolet and Nissan are also keen on adopting NMC battery technology for their vehicles.

Bridging the gap in demand is the lucrative challenge for mining companies who can bring new supplies to the table in the near term.

On Monday, Mercedes-Benz detailed some more its plans for what it calls electromobility. The most important news of all is, of course, the fact that Mercedes-Benz will have electric versions for the entire fleet of models it has in production.

The goal is to “offer more than 50 electrified vehicle variants” to its customers, either plug-in hybrids or fully electric. There will also be mild-hybrid variants that will use the new 48-volt-system.

Ten billion euros will be invested by Mercedes-Benz in the following years in this gargantuan project to develop electric production hubs for the vehicles themselves, but also for the carmaker’s own battery manufacturing plants.

To be sold under the EQ brand, Mercedes’ electric vehicles will start production at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Bremen in 2019. The first model to roll of the assembly lines will be the EQC, which will also be produced with BAIC in China and in the U.S. at the Tuscaloosa factory.

The battery pack used by the electric SUV is a 70 kWh unit, capable of offering a driving range of over 300 miles per charge.

“Our electric vehicles will be built in six plants on three continents. We address every market segment: from the smart fortwo seater, to the large SUV,” said Markus Schäfer, Member of the Divisional Board of Mercedes-Benz Cars, Production and Supply Chain.

“In case of a short-term high demand in another part of the world our battery factories are also well prepared for export. The electric initiative of Mercedes-Benz Cars is right on track. Our global production network is ready for e-mobility. We are electrifying the future.”