Battery Metals

Australia’s Nickel Industries said on Friday it planned to raise A$943 million ($633.32 million) and had executed an agreement to reduce its investment in the Excelsior Nickel Cobalt (ENC) project in Indonesia.

Under the latest placement, the company will issue about 20% of its shares to PT Danusa Tambang Nusantara, a subsidiary of Indonesia’s PT United Tractors Tbk.

The placement will be directed towards doubling production of the ENC Project via Stage 2 Expansion, the company said in a statement.

The Sydney-based miner has been working towards developing nickel for batteries, with it raising $471 million capital in January to fund its acquisition of several nickel projects in Indonesia.

“The acquisition of a strategic minority stake in Nickel Industries is another important step in the diversification of our business,” United Tractors president director Frans Kesuma said.

The latest placement will be carried out at an issue price of A$1.10 per share, representing a premium of 27.2% to the Nickel Industries stock’s last close on June 8.

For years, the US electric vehicle industry has grappled with two supply-chain issues: how to source critical materials for battery production, and what to do with old batteries once they’re spent. A deal announced today by Ascend Elements aims to address both challenges.

The Massachusetts-based maker of battery materials said it has reached a billion-dollar deal with an unnamed automaker to reprocess old batteries into cathode material, a substance that’s responsible for more than one third of the expense of a finished EV battery pack. Ascend is building a cathode plant in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and plans to begin deliveries next year.

The contract covers cathode for at least 40 gigawatt hours of batteries a year, Ascend Chief Executive Officer Mike O’Kronley said in an interview, enough for 750,000 electric cars. In 2021, that would have satisfied the entire US EV industry, but five times as much cathode will be needed by 2025, according to BloombergNEF data. Ascend’s contract marks the second major deal for cathode made in the US, and follows a similar agreement between Nevada-based Redwood Materials Inc. and Panasonic Holdings Corp. in November.

Most of the world’s cathode currently comes from China, but US-sourced battery materials are in increasingly high demand. To qualify for consumer tax incentives passed in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, EV batteries must be built in North America using materials processed by close US trading partners, which excludes China. Those incentives and others pushed by the Biden administration have spurred more than $70 billion of investments since last August along America’s new Battery Belt, which stretches roughly from Michigan to Georgia.

“When you step back and look at it, we haven’t seen this level of investment in manufacturing in the United States in decades,” O’Kronley said. “This is really just the start. It represents one of the very first commercial realizations of what the US is trying to do nationally.”

Ascend was founded in 2015 by two battery researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. They developed a process for extracting complex cathode chemistries directly from shredded battery materials — skipping the laborious process of first extracting each mineral individually. At a plant in Covington, Georgia, Ascend recycles battery materials out of discarded consumer electronics and manufacturing scrap from plants run by Honda Motor Co. and Hitachi Ltd., among others.

O’Kronley says Ascend has laid the foundations for its new cathode plant in Kentucky and plans to begin installing manufacturing equipment by the end of the year. Cathode delivery will start in the fourth quarter of next year, with full-volume production in 2025. The contract is for a minimum of $1 billion of cathode delivered over no more than five years, with options for the buyer to expand to $5 billion of cathode under similar terms. Ascend said the buyer requested not to be named.

O’Kronley worked in auto manufacturing for 30 years before becoming CEO at Ascend in 2020. In 2016, he was head of corporate strategy at A123 Systems LLC, a producer of lithium-ion batteries, when he received some early samples of recycled cathode from Ascend. Prototype battery supplies rarely hold up against established products, but A123 built Ascend’s cathode into some batteries for testing against a leading supplier.

“That material performed better than the material A123 was buying — really to the surprise of the entire technical team,” O’Kronley said. A123 soon became an investor in Ascend, and O’Kronley joined the company’s board. Ascend plans to close a Series D funding round this summer to finance additional factory expansion, though O’Kronley said it hasn’t decided whether to build additional operations in Kentucky or elsewhere.

The company’s growth to this point was assisted by $480 million in matching grants from the US infrastructure law, which O’Kronley described as key. Battery manufacturers “knew what we were capable of, we just needed to prove that we could build a factory,” he said. “Having that non-diluted funding come in was extremely helpful and is now starting to translate into commercial contracts.”

EVs with a single battery pack might seem like the norm, but Michigan-based Our Next Energy (ONE), a battery technology company, champions the idea that the key to longer range is having not one, but two battery packs.

As we reported previously, the start-up is working with BMW to incorporate its dual-chemistry battery into the German carmaker’s iX electric SUV. New details reveal how ONE’s patented technology might be potentially beneficial.

The company’s dual-chemistry battery, called Gemini, has a capacity of 185 kilowatt hours and delivers a claimed range of 600 miles. The battery has an energy density of 450 Watt-hours per liter. Gemini uses a smaller lithium iron phosphate (LFP) unit with a larger range-extending battery. The former provides 150 miles of range, ideal for daily driving, while the latter is capable of 450 miles, and activates only during longer distances.

Although we don’t know the exact chemistry of the larger battery, ONE said it’s anode-free and uses a high proportion of materials abundant in North America, like manganese, to reduce the percentage of nickel and graphite, while eliminating cobalt. By reducing the proportion of these materials, the risk of thermal runaway is lower, costs are reduced, and manufacturing is less complex, according to the company.

There’s also an ethical argument for the elimination of cobalt from EV batteries. Cobalt is expensive, and 70 percent of it is sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where illegal child labor is a concern, according to Institutional Shareholder Services, a corporate governance firm.

An estimate by McKinsey suggests that 90 percent of cobalt supply comes as a by-product of nickel and copper – which can complicate expansion projects. Moreover, China is the leader in the refined output of cobalt, which contradicts the Inflation Reduction Act’s critical minerals clause wherein EVs can qualify for tax credits if a percentage of the minerals used in their batteries are sourced locally.

Hence, ONE plans to focus on materials more easily available in North America. Its anode-free cells have an energy density of 1,007 Wh/l, which is nearly twice the industry average, according to the company.

Anode, a battery component on its negative terminal responsible for charging times, might contain graphite or silicon – getting rid of anode can enable improved energy density, and also potentially prevent overheating, which has been the cause of multiple recalls in the past.

ONE’s CEO Mujeeb Ijaz told Automotive News that he expects the new battery technology to be less expensive than comparative chemistries at about $50/kWh of storage. The cost for LFP and NMC is roughly $75 and $115, respectively, he said.

In June 2022, the company garnered $65 million in funding from BMW i Ventures, the German automaker’s venture capital arm. In its series B funding round in February 2023, the start-up raised another $300M – its total valuation is now over $1 billion.

The BMW iX with its dual-chemistry battery has not been tested yet, but we’re curious to see how it fares in the real world, and if it can reach the claimed 600-mile range. Currently, the longest-range EV is the Lucid Air Grand Touring with an EPA-estimated range of 516 miles.

India’s salt-to-software conglomerate Tata Group signed an agreement with the Gujarat state government to set up a giga-factory for manufacturing lithium-ion cells, with an estimated initial investment of around 130 billion rupees ($1.6 billion).

Tata Agaratas Energy Storage Solutions Pvt., a subsidiary of Tata Group, signed a memorandum of understanding on Friday to establish an electric-vehicle battery plant that will have a production capacity of 20 gigawatt-hours, generating direct and indirect employment for more than 13,000 people, according to a state government document posted on its website.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is working toward making the world’s most-populous nation carbon net zero by 2070. Still, India is lagging behind nations like China and the US in adopting electric transport.

The Tata plant would make Gujarat a leader in lithium-battery manufacturing and the group will receive assistance in setting up a production eco-system in the state, the state government said. A Tata Group representative declined to comment.

Tata Group’s decision comes at a time when its unit Jaguar Land Rover is considering setting up a major EV battery plant in Britain. Tata favours a factory in England over Spain after the UK government offered a support package, Bloomberg reported in May.