Lithium News

Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt is another key player in Zimbabwe’s lithium extraction industry

A major mining company in Zimbabwe has agreed to start shipping a lithium-containing rock called spodumene concentrate from its facilities to China next year.

Lithium deposits are a cornerstone to a shifting market for EV technology. This has prompted an increase in demand for production at mines in Zimbabwe, home to large deposits of the element.

Zulu lithium mines is a subsidiary of Premier African Minerals. The company’s chief executive, George Roach, told the Reuters news agency on Monday that the firm selected Suzhou TA&A Ultra Clean Technology Co. from a number of Chinese, European and Australian investors.

“At one point, I was involved with 11 separate negotiations with people all wanting Zulu,” Roach said. “It was a very intense period.”

Suzhou has agreed to invest $35 million (€34.71 million) in the construction of a pilot plant at the Zulu mine, which will help the facility produce up to 50,000 tones of lithium-containing rocks annually. This new investment sets the company on the path to achieving vertical integration of the lithium battery supply chain.

SUZHOU SUPPLIES LITHIUM AND OWNS EV BATTERIES

Suzhou is also a joint owner and supplier of spodumene concentrate for Yibin Tianyi, China’s leading lithium producer. Suzhou jointly owns Yibin Tianyi with CATL, a Chinese battery manufacturing company that produces more than 30% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries.

CATL is a the producer of EV batteries globally

In a move similar Suzhou’s, China’s Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt last month announced plans to invest $300 million in a hard-rock lithium mine just outside of Zimbabwe’s capital.

The money will be used to “construct a process plant with a capacity to treat around 4.5 million tonnes of ore and produce 400,000 tones of lithium concentrate per annum,” Huayou subsidiary Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe said to Reuters in an update on the project.

THE CHANGING EV BATTERY MARKET

Lithium is an essential component in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles. A shift in battery technology has led to a surge in its price market.

While electric vehicle battery manufacturers favored nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) batteries in the past, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries are gaining popularity.

The rising price of lithium is already affecting the price of electric vehicles with Tesla significantly increasing its prices by as much as $6,000 this month.

Zimbabwe is home to some of the world’s largest lithium reserves. Zimbabwe’s government hopes to transition the nation into an upper-middle income economy by 2030 — and the mining industry has been slated by the government as a key component to realizing this vision.

Panasonic said Wednesday it plans to build the world’s largest EV battery plant, a $4 billion factory in Kansas that will manufacture and supply lithium-ion batteries to EV makers.

The factory is slated to be larger than the Gigafactory it operates with Tesla in Sparks, Nevada, which is already one of the largest lithium-ion battery factories in the world.

The electronics supplier also aims to begin producing a high-capacity battery for Tesla in early 2024. Those batteries are expected to increase energy capacity fivefold, which could boost range by more than 15% and cut production costs.

Panasonic said its advanced battery technology will improve EV range and that scaling its operations will lower the cost to produce EVs.

“With the increased electrification of the automotive market, expanding battery production in the U.S. is critical to help meet demand,” Kazuo Tadanobu, president and CEO of Panasonic Energy, said in a statement.

The deal represents the largest economic development project in Kansas’s history. Located in the Kansas City region, the facility will create up to 4,000 new jobs and about $4 billion in capital investment.

This story is developing.

Shares of Tianqi Lithium slumped about 10% in their Hong Kong market debut Wednesday, after the Chinese company raised about $1.7 billion in the city’s biggest listing so far this year.

The stock traded at around 74.50 Hong Kong dollars ($9.49), lower than the offer price of HK$82 ($10.45) a share. It slipped to as low as HK$72.65 before paring back some losses.

Tianqi Lithium, which was already listed in Shenzhen, is one of the world’s top suppliers of rechargeable battery components for electric vehicles.

“We are listed in China already and it is already a very good, big platform for financing. But it is limited in China,” Frank Ha, the executive director and CEO at Tianqi Lithium, told CNBC’s “Streets Signs Asia” on Wednesday.

“We going into the Hong Kong market that is our strategy of crossing the globe. We need to make an international platform for financing. That’s why that we considered and then evaluate the situation. I think the current time is the best time that we can come here to list in the market,” he added.

Tianqi Lithium’s outlook

The race is on in China to offer electric car drivers the fastest possible EV charging experience. XPeng and GAC Aion say they have 480 kW chargers coming, but at its second Power Day this week, NIO has topped both with its announcement that it will have 5o0 kW, 640 amp chargers in operation both in China and Europe by the end of this year.

According to CNEvPost, NIO provided few details about its new ultra high power chargers, but XPeng says its 480 kW equipment is capable of charging four times faster than those currently available on the market and 12 times faster than mainstream charging stations. Vehicles can add 200 kilometers of range in as little as five minutes of charging time and charge the battery from 10 to 80% in 12 minutes. Since the NIO chargers will have 20 kW more power, those performance figures should be enhanced, at least a little bit.

3rd Generation Battery Swap Stations

NIO began installing battery swapping stations several years ago. The first generation stations held 5 batteries and could provided up to 120 swaps a day. The company ultimately installed 200 before rolling out its second generation swapping stations in April of last year. As of now, there are a total of 1011 NIO battery swapping stations, most of them in China, but a few in Europe as well. The second generation facilities store 13 batteries and can perform 312 swaps daily. There are already four of them in Oslo, with more planned for Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim and Kristiansand this year. NIO expects to have 20 of them in Norway by the end of 2022, according to Electrive.

This week, the company said the third generation swap stations will be able to store more batteries and will have a more flexible layout but provided no further details. other than to say they are nearing the end of development and are being tested. The first of them is expected to go into service by the end of this year or early in 2023. NIO  says it will complete a battery swap network with full coverage on many highways and in 19 urban areas by 2025.

NIO currently has 8,961 battery packs in its swapping system — 3,821 long range and 5,140 standard range. It is developing V2G technology that will allow those batteries to provide energy storage for local power grids using its new back end interface.

The Takeaway

The EV revolution needs more and faster chargers. China is leading the way and letting the rest of the world follow. Manufacturers in Europe and North America are in danger of falling well behind there Chinese competitors. The US in particular is way behind in terms of charging speed and availability of reliable charging equipment.

All the battery factories in the world won’t help if there are no places to charge batteries quickly. NIO and XPeng have thrown down the gauntlet. Now to see how those US and European companies respond.

In years to come, sodium-ion batteries (NIBs) could potentially be a great alternative to current energy storage systems. Despite their advantages, including the abundance of sodium and a potentially long cycle life, these sodium-based batteries are often less stable than lithium-based batteries, due to the instability of the solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI), a passivation layer that forms on electrode surfaces after repeated battery operation cycles.

Past studies have showed that in NIBs with a high voltage cathode, the SEI dissolves more rapidly than that in lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). This causes a series of side reactions, as well as the rapid depletion of the electrolyte and an irreversible loss of capacity, dramatically decreasing the stability and performance of NIBs.

Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have recently developed a new electrolyte that lowers the solvation ability of the SEI on the anode of NIBs batteries, while also forming a stable protective layer to protect the cathode. This electrolyte, introduced in a paper published in Nature Energy, could enable the development of high-voltage sodium-ion batteries that are both stable and reliable.

“Our recent paper is about a novel electrolyte that can stabilize the anode in a high voltage (4.2V) sodium ion battery and extent its cycle life,” Ji-Guang Zhang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Existing electrolytes typically lead to a short cycle life when used at more than 4V. The primary objective of our work was to allow sodium ion batteries to operate at higher voltage and increase its energy density.”

For an NIB to retain its stability over time, the anode (i.e., negatively charged electrode in a battery) inside it requires a protection layer, known as the SEI, with a long lifecycle. If this layer is dissolved while a battery is operating, as observed in past studies, the battery’s performance will decrease dramatically. To overcome the limitations of previously developed NIBs, Zhang and his colleagues thus set out to design a new electrolyte that would extend the lifecycle of SEIs.

“Our new electrolyte suppresses the dissolution of the anode’s protection layer,” Zhang explained. “The electrolyte is made of a more stable salt (sodium bis(fluorosulfonyl)imide (NaFSI)) and a solvent with a lower dielectric constant. Unlike the conventional electrolytes that forms a protection layer which is rich in organic components and easy to dissolve, the new electrolyte leads to the formation of a protection layer that is rich in inorganic components, so it’s more stable during cycling and storage.”

The researchers tested their electrolyte in an HC||NaNMC full cell and found that it attained remarkable results. Specifically, the cell could retain over 90% of its capacity after 300 cycles when charged to 4.2 V. These findings suggest that the electrolyte could potentially enable production of more stable and better performing sodium-based energy storage solutions.

“We successfully reduced the solvability of the anode protection layer and therefore enabled the long-term operation of high voltage sodium ion batteries,” Zhang added. “In our next studies, we plan to further increase the operation voltage of sodium-based batteries and improve their cycle life.”