Battery Metals

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A complete scene analysis, which has Associate in the Nursing assessment of the parent market.
Important changes in market dynamics.
Market segmentation up to the second or third level.
Historical, current, and projected size of the market from the stance of each price and volume.
Reporting and analysis of recent trade developments.
Market shares and methods of key players.
Emerging niche segments and regional markets.

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A chemistry team at the University of Waterloo, Canada, has achieved what may be a major breakthrough in battery technology. Led by Chemistry Professor Linda Nazar, the team discovered that the performance of a lithium-sulfur battery can be boosted dramatically by using a nanosheet of manganese dioxide. The increase has the potential to propel an electric vehicle three times further than a lithium-ion battery of the same weight.

Tripling the range of electric motorcycles could provide a huge boost to the fledgling industry by removing the primary concern most potential buyers have with the technology. If battery life can be extended in kind, and costs kept in line by volume production, acceptance of electric motorcycles will likely improve significantly.

“This is a major step forward and brings the Li-S battery one step closer to reality,” said Nazar, who also holds the Canada Research Chair in Solid State Energy Materials.

The study revealed that the surface of the manganese dioxide nanosheet essentially transforms the sulfur cathode of a Li-S battery into a high-performance cathode that can recharge more than 2,000 times. Cathodes and anodes are the two electrodes of a battery, separated by an electrolyte solution. Sulfur, which is an extremely abundant, relatively light, and very cheap battery material, historically hasn’t worked as a cathode material because it dissolves into the electrolyte solution as the battery discharges.

The university reported that previous research by Nazar found that metallic titanium oxide could work to stabilize the sulfur, but the research published this week shows that nanosheets of manganese dioxide work even better. The main goal of this paper is to explain the mechanism at work. The chemical reaction that stabilizes the sulfur is similar to a chemical process discovered in 1845 during the golden age of German sulfur chemistry.

Chicago public health officials have signed off on a Southeast Side company’s updated plan to cut emissions of brain-damaging manganese dust that regulators say pose a health risk to nearby residents.

At its storage terminal along the Calumet River, S.H. Bell Co. has agreed to “a number of aggressive proactive mitigation measures,” according to a letter from Chicago’s Department of Public Health. Under the plan, approved late last month, the company agrees to no longer store manganese-containing materials outdoors, suspend operations involving manganese in high-wind conditions and increase the number of dust-monitoring inspections.

“We expect all companies to comply with our strict environmental standards and are prepared to take all appropriate steps necessary to protect our residents and communities,” said Julie Morita, the city’s public health commissioner, in a statement.

After reviewing an earlier version of the plan, the city notified S.H. Bell in August that it needed to submit a “more robust, quantifiable and protective” strategy to control pollutants, including manganese, a metal that is essential to steelmaking but that can cause neurological defects similar to Parkinson’s disease at high exposures, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The notice came one week after the EPA cited the Pittsburgh-based company’s Chicago facility with violations of the Clean Air Act for exceeding federal health standards related to manganese.

The agency found average manganese concentrations that exceeded a federal threshold of 0.3 micrograms per cubic meter of air over a four-month period, which the EPA said created a health risk to residents living nearby. The facility is situated across the street from rows of single-family homes in the East Side neighborhood, a community of predominantly low-income and minority residents that spent years fighting for increased protection from lung-damaging petcoke dust stored at nearby sites.

Nearly 20,000 people, including more than 6,000 children, live within 1 mile of the company’s storage site.

The health department’s letter also states that average monthly concentrations of manganese at S.H. Bell have decreased since the city increased inspections at the facility following the EPA’s notice of violation.

“S.H. Bell is committed to ensuring a safe and healthy environment for the community and our employees,” the company said in a statement. “We worked closely with the city to develop our recently approved dust control plan that goes above and beyond local, state and federal regulations. The city of Chicago has among the strongest bulk material handling regulations in the nation, and we believe that all facilities in the region should also be in compliance.”

The decision on S.H. Bell’s plan came days after the city announced that it would require a nearby company to install air monitors to detect levels of manganese and other toxic metals. Watco Transloading, a competitor of S.H. Bell, now has three months to install the monitors at its facility 3 miles down the Calumet River.

Preliminary results from an ongoing University of Illinois at Chicago study of toxic metals on the Southeast Side found that children in the area have higher levels of manganese in their toenails than children in other parts of Chicago.

In addition to the UIC study, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is evaluating manganese data from air monitors that S.H. Bell was forced to install earlier this year as a result of previous violations.

Several Southeast Side advocacy groups have called on Chicago to ban the storage or handling of manganese in residential areas, including at S.H. Bell.

Fines are the fine particles of manganese ore created when crushing manganese rocks. The fines are heated to sinter them (make them stick together, or become “agglomerated”).

“The mines produce a lot of fines,” Hockaday explained. “But they can’t sell them, as furnaces won’t buy materials that are too fine.”

So the mines separate out the fines, and agglomerate them together into bigger pellets between 6 mm and 75 mm, by wetting them to make them sticky, and rolling them into lumps called green sinter, mixing in about 10% of coke particles.

Then these green sinter “mud balls” are heated in a sintering machine on conveyor belts to about 600°C with diesel burners which makes the coke burn, causing the temperature to rise to 1200°C, at which point the outer surfaces of the mud balls partially melt, making them stronger and more cohesive.

As well as replacing diesel to heat the green sinter, Hockaday believes she can also eliminate the coke combustion, for a carbon reduction of up to 100%, although the traditional industry has been skeptical.

“Some have raised the question that we need a reducing atmosphere because that’s the way it’s always been done,” she related. “But thermodynamically we should be able to get away with not adding coke fines, just sintering with solar energy. There’s no reaction that we can see that this requires carbon. So I hope to actually show that we can do this without any coke.”

Once the fines are sintered, they then go to a blast furnace or an electric arc furnace, to smelt the manganese iron into manganese alloys.

It is here that fines would be a big risk for literally gumming up the works or even causing explosions. In the blast furnace, hot gases are produced by the reduction reactions.

“These furnaces work with layers of chunky material, and you need spaces for the gases from the reactions to rise up through this material and escape at the top of the furnace. If you have fine particles, almost powder, you can imagine how this fills the pores, preventing the gases from escaping,” she explained.

The price action on battery metals has reached near-ludicrous levels this year; the global expectation of a new world in which all private vehicles are electric is becoming ever-more realised, and the cost of the associated materials is climbing rapidly. But not in all cases. Lithium and cobalt may have bust through the top of the chart, but manganese has experienced somewhat of a quieter growth. A smorgasbord of factors will change this in the very near future, making manganese the only remaining battery metal with major growth potential.

Unlike steel demand, which is renowned for being steady, the supply of manganese is declining; in 2016, the USGS estimated that the world produced 8.6% less manganese than in 2015, yet the gulf between manganese production and consumption in China, for example, has been widening since 2001, and demand for imported manganese ore in China more than doubled between 2006 and 2016. There has rarely been more opportunity to enter the manganese supply chain than exists today.

Towards the end of last year, manganese prices surged in response to a rapid decline of industry stock levels. These were largely caused by producers cutting output in response to the previous year’s low prices combined with logistical problems in South Africa as well as renewed demand from China. In 2017, however, prices have taken the market by surprise by continuing to rise.

This could be due, in part, to manganese’s critical role in the production of batteries. Many people are aware of the requirements for lithium and cobalt in modern portable technologies, but manganese has flown a little under the hype-radar over the last few years and only seems to be catching up more recently, and at a slower pace. The need for battery metals is reaching fever pitch, and new patents involving these crucial ingredients are emerging every month.

Already, 3M has patented its own NMC battery which is to be used by LG Chem in the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf, as well as by BMW, while General Electric has gone for a lithium-manganese battery. Tesla meanwhile has signed a five year exclusive agreement with prominent NMC battery researcher, Dr. Jeff Dahn, to help reduce the costs of producing its batteries, but all of these formulations require a quantity of manganese.

Additionally, the importance of manganese in agriculture cannot be underestimated, since the micronutrient market is poised to grow at 8% CAGR to $7.7bn by 2020. Not only is manganese a requisite ingredient for photosynthesis, experiments conducted in Brazil have shown that the addition of a small amount of manganese to soils can increase crop yield by around 30%, and because of this, high purity, high grade manganese