Lithium News

Chinese lithium processors are ratcheting up hedging to offset wild swings in the battery metal, a sign that local futures launched around a year ago are gaining traction.

Several companies have unveiled their hedging exposure via lithium carbonate futures during the recent earnings season, including Ganfeng Lithium Group Co. and Sichuan Yahua Industrial Group Co. The contracts on the Guangzhou Futures Exchange were the first of their kind in China, and trading is already more active than for lithium futures in established commodities hubs like London, Chicago and Singapore.

The contracts’ first year has not been without drama — trading limits had to be raised a couple of times late last year to cope with price spikes — but the persistent downturn in prices for lithium carbonate, a semi-processed form of the electric vehicle battery ingredient, has helped juice volumes. Spot prices are down almost 90% from a peak in late 2022, as a supply glut coincides a slower-than-expected growth in EV demand.

“The pickup in hedging activity is mainly because of the prolonged price slump,” said Zhang Weixin, an analyst at China Futures Co. “As the futures market in Guangzhou became more mature and stable, producers are finding hedging effective in countering the downturn risks.”

The trading volume of lithium futures in Guangzhou was more than nine times higher in July than when they were launched a year earlier. The robust activity is helping to achieve China’s goal of making the country a price-maker rather than taker in commodities essential to the energy transition. The exchange also hosts trading of futures for industrial silicon, and has plans to list contracts for lithium hydroxide, palladium and platinum.

China accounts for about 70% of the world’s lithium refining capacity, data from BloombergNEF show, but the country imported almost 60% of its raw lithium needs last year, according to the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association. That makes companies there more vulnerable to price volatility and geopolitical risks.

Ganfeng said it put 38 million yuan ($5.4 million) into futures trading in the first half ,and made a profit of 3.43 million yuan. Sichuan Yahua is among firms that started hedging this year, saying the move was “to control the impact of product prices on company profits.”

Another major Chinese lithium producer, Tianqi Lithium Corp., said it hadn’t engaged in hedging yet, but is setting up a team to do so. Tianqi wants to avoid risks caused by price fluctuations on its operations by “effectively combining futures and spot transactions,” it said.

Bolivia state-owned Yacimientos de Litio Boliviano (YLB) has shortlisted four companies to advance into the next phase of a bid to develop pilot lithium extraction plants in the country’s salt flats.

The companies selected are China’s CBC, Italy’s Protecno, France’s Eramet and Australia’s Eau Lithium, which YLB said were the bidders with the highest scores for technological maturity, financial propositions, technical parameters and project execution time.

The tender, launched earlier this year, aims to develop plants in seven of Bolivia’s 28 salt flats, including Uyuni, Coipasa, Pastos Grandes, Capina, Cañapa, Chiguana, and Empexa.

CBC submitted a plan to extract lithium from residual brine through the adsorption method. Protecno put forward a proposal to treat wastewater from existing plants, which could be used to supply nearby communities, as well as well water. Eramet and Eau Lithium presented their own strategy to mine the battery metal using direct lithium extraction (DLE) from well brine, YLB said.

The announcement comes amid a management shake-up at YLB, which saw Omar Alarcon named the firm’s new chief executive on Monday, replacing predecessor Karla Calderon.

YLB aims to position Bolivia as a leading global supplier of lithium, with an ambitious goal of exporting 50,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent annually.

But political moves and red tape have hindered the nation’s efforts. To advance the construction of industrial plants in Bolivia, bidding companies must first undertake prior, free, and informed consultation processes, along with comprehensive environmental impact assessments. This requires that they share detailed project information with local communities.

Following the completion of such procedures and the conclusion of contract negotiations between YLB and Chinese firms already involved in the local market, the agreements must be submitted to the legislative assembly for approval.

Analysts estimate that the contracts are unlikely to obtain the green light due to the existing political fragmentation within the assembly and the upcoming general elections in 2025.

While the country and YLB are focusing on DLE as the cornerstone of its industrial strategy, market experts caution that the technology remains underdeveloped for large-scale industrial application.

The state has invested more than $800 million in DLE over the past two-years, but only recently admitted to relatively poor results.

Evaporation ponds work well enough in the salt flats of neighbouring Chile and Argentina, but seem less suited to Bolivia, where the brine has high levels of impurities and the salt flats have a rainy season that lasts several months.

DLE methods pull lithium straight from brine, potentially eliminating the need for solar evaporation, and also reducing water consumption and dependency on the weather.

Unripe lithium ambitions

The South American landlocked country has a history of unfulfilled lithium dreams. It has tried and failed to develop its industry several times since the 1990s, producing only an accumulated 1,400 tonnes since 2018.

In late 2023, Bolivia opened its first industrial-scale lithium plant. The $100 million facility is expected to produce as much as 15,000 tons of lithium carbonate a year. Initial output won’t be battery grade and the plant will reach full capacity in 2025.

The country inked in June agreements with two other Chinese companies, the CBC consortium and Citic Guoan, as well as with Russia’s Uranium One Group, to build lithium carbonate production facilities.

The deals, totalling $1.4 billion in investment, came after a similar arrangement agreed in January with China’s CATL, the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles batteries.

The government has also tied up with Altmin, an India-based firm, to develop the technology of cathode materials for lithium batteries.

A recent study focused on polymer binders could point to future breakthroughs in solid-state batteries, enabling safer, more powerful, and longer-lasting energy storage. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have discovered that the molecular weight of these often-overlooked components plays a crucial role in the performance and durability of sulfide solid-state electrolytes (SSEs), a key element of next-generation battery technology.

Toward solid-state batteries

Solid-state batteries offer several advantages over conventional lithium-ion designs. They provide higher energy density, potentially enabling longer ranges in electric vehicles and more compact batteries in portable devices, including smartphones and laptops.

Additionally, solid-state batteries boast a superior safety profile, eliminating the risk of fires associated with liquid electrolytes in traditional lithium-ion batteries.

Yet the practical implementation of solid-state batteries has faced hurdles. One major challenge is achieving high ionic conductivity while maintaining mechanical stability in the solid-state electrolyte. Ionic conductivity is crucial for efficient battery operation, while mechanical stability ensures the battery’s structural integrity over numerous charge-discharge cycles. In research published in ACS Energy Letters, the scientists describe why the choice of polymer binders, essential for creating robust, freestanding SSE films, and how that can help overcome the challenges.

The role of molecular weight

Under the guidance of Guang Yang, Ph.D., the researchers explored the role of polymer binder entanglement in developing flexible, sheet-type sulfide solid-state electrolytes (SSEs) for all-solid-state batteries. Their study revealed that the molecular weight of polymer binders has a dual impact on SSE films.

First, the higher molecular weight binders improve the film’s robustness but increase electrical resistance. Second, the lower molecular weight binders enhance uniformity but lack structural strength.

This delicate balance between molecular weight and performance is crucial for optimizing SSE films. Most notably, the team’s research suggests the potential to double energy storage capacity to 500 watt-hours per kilogram.

What’s next

Looking ahead, the research team plans to build a prototype device integrating their thin film into next-generation negative and positive electrodes. This will allow them to test the SSE under practical battery conditions, evaluating its performance, durability, and scalability.

To support this research, the team is upgrading their laboratory facilities. They plan on establishing 7,000 square feet of specialized lab space with controlled low-humidity environments. They also will need to improve safeguards when working with sulfide materials, which are prone to contamination. “To address this, we need dedicated glove boxes in our chemistry lab,” Yang explained. “It can be challenging in many settings to allocate resources for such specialized equipment. At ORNL, we have eight glove boxes specifically for this work.”

An energy start-up plans to build the world’s biggest battery in Lincoln, Maine, to help ease stresses on the region’s power grid. The project is being funded by the Department of Energy, which is putting $147 million in grants toward constructing the ambitious energy storage solution.

If the current plans remain unchanged, the battery will be capable of storing 8,500 megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy, representatives of Form Energy, the company behind the project, said in a statement Aug. 6.

The battery system will have the most energy capacity of any announced in the world, Mateo Jaramillo, CEO and co-founder of Form Energy, said in the statement. The current record is held by the Edwards and Sanborn solar-plus-storage project in California, which uses over 120,000 batteries to store 3,287 MWh.

To put that 8,500 MWh of energy into context, Freeing Energy estimates that a single megawatt-hour would provide enough power for an electric car to travel 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers). If you could somehow hook Form Energy’s battery system up to that electric car, it could travel approximately 31 million miles (50 million km) on a single charge — enough to circumnavigate the Earth 1,228 times. The capacity in the best laptops, meanwhile, is approximately 65 Wh, meaning this battery can store 130 million times more energy.

The battery bank will be built using Form Energy’s novel iron-air battery system, which works using a process of “reversible rusting”. In short, when the battery discharges, it takes in oxygen from the air and converts the iron inside the battery to rust. Then, when the battery is recharging the process is reversed — converting rust back into iron and releasing oxygen into the air.

The storage system will be built up from multiple individual battery modules, each about the size of a side-by-side washer/dryer set, Form Energy representatives said. Each module will contain approximately 50 3-foot-tall (1 meter)- cells, which contain iron and air electrodes along with a water-based, non-flammable electrolyte solution.

Although the promise of creating the world’s largest battery is enticing, the company has six large-scale projects underway and none of them have been completed yet. The first project due for completion is a 150 MWh pilot project built in partnership with Great River Energy in Cambridge, Minnesota, followed by a much larger 1,500 MWh multi-day storage facility in nearby Becker — due by the end of 2025.

The Maine battery project is Form Energy’s most ambitious project to date at over five times the capacity of the Great River Energy station project. According to the clean energy news site Canary Media, it’s also the first project the start-up has undertaken itself, rather than in collaboration with an energy supplier.

Like the petroleum industry itself, households are heavily invested in existing transport technologies. Getting oil and gas companies—and consumers—to switch to zero-emissions transport is a huge challenge.

We can’t presume battery electric vehicles (EVs) will displace fossil fuel vehicles any time soon. They are not accessible to most households and don’t offer radically better transport services. They drive on the same congested roads with the same speed limits.

On the supply side, electrifying entire transport fleets requires major infrastructure expansions. Even with strong demand, such infrastructures will struggle to displace Big Oil’s dominant and affordable alternative.

It’s a classic chicken-and-egg predicament. Consumers and vehicle makers won’t switch unless they are confident the required refueling infrastructures will be available. But those infrastructures won’t materialize without sufficient demand.

Repurposing existing infrastructure to supply clean fuels could convince both consumers and vehicle manufacturers to make the switch. But what would that take?

Clean fuel alternatives

Major economies (including the United States, European Union and Japan) and car manufacturers, such as Toyota and BMW, are actively promoting clean hydrogen-based technologies such as hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Toyota and some heavy vehicle manufacturers are also investing in vehicles that could combust clean hydrogen.

A lithium-ion battery’s very first charge is more momentous than it sounds. It determines how well and how long the battery will work from then on—in particular, how many cycles of charging and discharging it can handle before deteriorating.

In a study published today in Joule, researchers at the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center report that giving batteries this first charge at unusually high currents increased their average lifespan by 50% while decreasing the initial charging time from 10 hours to just 20 minutes.

Just as important, the researchers were able to use scientific machine learning to pinpoint specific changes in the battery electrodes that account for this increase in lifespan and performance—invaluable insights for battery manufacturers looking to streamline their processes and improve their products.

The study was carried out by a SLAC/Stanford team led by Professor Will Chueh in collaboration with researchers from the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Washington. It is part of SLAC’s sustainability research and a broader effort to reimagine our energy future leveraging the lab’s unique tools and expertise and partnerships with industry.

“This is an excellent example of how SLAC is doing manufacturing science to make critical technologies for the energy transition more affordable,” Chueh said. “We’re solving a real challenge that industry is facing; critically, we partner with industry from the get-go.”

The results have practical implications for manufacturing not just lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and the electric grid, but for other technologies, too, said Steven Torrisi, a senior research scientist at TRI who collaborated on the research.

“This study is very exciting for us,” he said. “Battery manufacturing is extremely capital, energy and time intensive. It takes a long time to spin up manufacturing of a new battery, and it’s really difficult to optimize the manufacturing process because there are so many factors involved.”

Torrisi said the results of this research “demonstrate a generalizable approach for understanding and optimizing this crucial step in battery manufacturing. Further, we may be able to transfer what we have learned to new processes, facilities, equipment and battery chemistries in the future.”

A ‘squishy layer’ that’s key to battery performance

To understand what happens during the battery’s initial cycling, Chueh’s team builds pouch cells in which the positive and negative electrodes are surrounded by an electrolyte solution where lithium ions move freely.

When a battery charges, lithium ions flow into the negative electrode for storage. When a battery discharges, they flow back out and travel to the positive electrode; this triggers a flow of electrons for powering devices, from electric cars to the electricity grid.

The positive electrode of a newly minted battery is 100% full of lithium, said Xiao Cui, the lead researcher for the battery informatics team in Chueh’s lab. Every time the battery goes through a charge-discharge cycle, some of the lithium is deactivated. Minimizing those losses prolongs the battery’s working lifetime.

Oddly enough, one way to minimize the overall lithium loss is to deliberately lose a large percentage of the initial supply of lithium during the battery’s first charge, Cui said. It’s like making a small investment that yields good returns down the road.

This first-cycle lithium loss is not in vain. The lost lithium becomes part of a squishy layer called the solid electrolyte interphase, or SEI, that forms on the surface of the negative electrode during the first charge. In return, the SEI protects the negative electrode from side reactions that would accelerate the lithium loss and degrade the battery faster over time. Getting the SEI just right is so important that the first charge is known as the formation charge.

“Formation is the final step in the manufacturing process,” Cui said, “so if it fails, all the value and effort invested in the battery up to that point are wasted.”

High charging current boosts battery performance

Manufacturers generally give new batteries their first charge with low currents, on the theory that this will create the most robust SEI layer. But there’s a downside: Charging at low currents is time-consuming and costly and doesn’t necessarily yield optimal results. So, when recent studies suggested that faster charging with higher currents does not degrade battery performance, it was exciting news.

But researchers wanted to dig deeper. The charging current is just one of dozens of factors that go into the formation of SEI during the first charge. Testing all possible combinations of them in the lab to see which one worked best is an overwhelming task.

To whittle the problem down to manageable size, the research team used scientific machine learning to identify which factors are most important in achieving good results. To their surprise, just two of them—the temperature and current at which the battery is charged—stood out from all the rest.

Experiments confirmed that charging at high currents has a huge impact, increasing the lifespan of the average test battery by 50%. It also deactivated a much higher percentage of lithium up front—about 30%, compared to 9% with previous methods—but that turned out to have a positive effect.

Removing more lithium ions up front is a bit like scooping water out of a full bucket before carrying it, Cui said. The extra headspace in the bucket decreases the amount of water splashing out along the way. In similar fashion, deactivating more lithium ions during formation frees up headspace in the positive electrode and allows the electrode to cycle in a more efficient way, improving subsequent performance.

“Brute force optimization by trial-and-error is routine in manufacturing– how should we perform the first charge, and what is the winning combination of factors?” Chueh said. “Here, we didn’t just want to identify the best recipe for making a good battery; we wanted to understand how and why it works. This understanding is crucial for finding the best balance between battery performance and manufacturing efficiency.”