Lithium News

In a dusty plain in northern Argentina’s mountains, black tubes stretching two stories high fill a massive tank with salty brine sucked from deep below ground.

The brine contains lithium, a silvery white metal essential for making electric vehicle batteries and in high demand as the world shifts to green energy. French miner Eramet (ERMT.PA), opens new tab is attempting to use an innovative technique, known as direct lithium extraction, or DLE, in a race for cleaner, faster and cheaper ways to produce the metal with less water.

Unlike traditional methods, there are no pools of brine spanning the size of football fields where lithium is left behind after the liquid evaporates in the sun.

DLE, which extracts the metal much more quickly, could be critical to global production given 70% of the world’s lithium is found in brine, rather than rock or clay.

Eramet is being closely watched by competitors from the U.S. to Chile that are also working to commercialize DLE. It aims to pump out its first ton of lithium carbonate in November and scale up to 24,000 metric tons a year by mid-2025.

The $870 million project in the northern province of Salta puts Argentina, the world’s No. 4 lithium producer, in the spotlight ahead of projects due online in the country in the coming months from mining giant Rio Tinto, South Korea’s Posco and Chinese miners Zijin and Ganfeng.

Argentina’s new production should about double its capacity, narrowing the gap with Chile, Latin America’s top producer. Some analysts say it could overtake Chile around the end of the decade even if hurdles remain.

The exact timing for the ramp-up of Eramet’s Centenario plant, co-owned with Chinese nickel and steel giant Tsingshan, remains uncertain.

“It’s a complex plant,” CEO Christel Bories said in an interview. “The challenge is always, will we be able to reach the nominal capacity, and when?”

For over a decade, Eramet, which produces manganese, nickel and mineral sands elsewhere, tried different technologies before opting to develop a process largely in-house.

FASTER LITHIUM

ENTEK just got a conditional $1.2 billion loan from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office to build a lithium-ion battery separator factory in Terre Haute, Indiana.

A battery separator plays an essential role in the performance and safety of a lithium-ion battery. A battery separator is a membrane sandwiched between a battery’s anode and cathode. The separator prevents electronic conduction (i.e., shorts or direct contact) between the anode and cathode while permitting ionic conduction via the electrolyte.

The separators will be used primarily in EVs, strengthening the US lithium-ion battery cells supply chain. DOE estimates that by 2030, the North American lithium-ion EV battery industry will require annual separator production of 7 to 10 billion square meters.

Lebanon, Oregon-headquartered ENTEK will also be able to sell its separators to manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries for energy storage and is a contracted supplier to KORE Power.

Once complete, ENTEK’s factory is expected to have the capacity to manufacture 1.72 billion square meters of separator material annually for the North American EV market.

The number of EVs supported by this project depends upon the battery form factor – cylindrical, pouch, or prismatic – used for various battery chemistries. Each GWh of cell manufacturing requires 7-10 million square meters of battery separator depending on the battery form factor. Based on current form factors chosen by cell manufacturers, the project will support roughly 1.9 million mid-size EVs or 1.3 million eSUVs.

ENTEK’s new lithium-ion battery separator factory is expected to create 763 construction jobs and 635 operational jobs. The project will also help US EV manufacturers satisfy battery component sourcing requirements under the 30D Clean Vehicle Credit in President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Global EV battery maker SK On now has a joint development agreement with Sakuu, the “world’s first manufacturing platform for printing battery electrodes.”

Sakuu 3D prints fully functional batteries in custom shapes and sizes with patterned openings for thermal management in a fully dry process that doesn’t use solvents. The San Jose-based company says its Kavian 3D printing platform (pictured) can cut the cost of battery production nearly in half. It asserts that the batteries will last longer and be easier to recycle than current lithium-ion batteries.

SK On, the world’s fifth-largest battery maker, is among the first to partner with Sakuu in developing the Kavian platform. SK On currently operates two EV battery plants in Commerce, Georgia. It’s further expanding its presence in the US Southeast by constructing additional EV battery plants through joint ventures with Ford and Hyundai.

SK On is rapidly ramping up battery production plans in the US – earlier this week, the South Korea-headquartered battery maker had signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) with ExxonMobil for a multiyear offtake agreement of up to 100,000 metric tons of Arkansas lithium.

Some exciting developments in battery manufacturing could come from this partnership – it’s one to watch.

A new electrolyte design for lithium metal batteries could significantly boost the range of electric vehicles. Researchers at ETH Zurich have radically reduced the amount of environmentally harmful fluorine required to stabilize these batteries.

Lithium metal batteries are among the most promising candidates for the next generation of high-energy batteries. They can store at least twice as much energy per unit of volume as the lithium-ion batteries that are in widespread use today. This will mean, for example, that an electric car can travel twice as far on a single charge, or that a smartphone will not have to be recharged so often.

At present, there is still one crucial drawback with lithium metal batteries: the liquid electrolyte requires the addition of significant amounts of fluorinated solvents and fluorinated salts, which increases its environmental footprint.

Without the addition of fluorine, however, lithium metal batteries would be unstable, they would stop working after very few charging cycles and be prone to short circuits as well as overheating and igniting.

A research group led by Maria Lukatskaya, Professor of Electrochemical Energy Systems at ETH Zurich, has now developed a new method that dramatically reduces the amount of fluorine required in lithium metal batteries, thereby rendering them more environmentally friendly and more stable as well as cost-effective.

The work is published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science. An application for a patent has been made.

A stable protective layer increases battery safety and efficiency

The fluorinated compounds from the electrolyte help the formation of a protective layer around the metallic lithium at the negative electrode of the battery.

“This protective layer can be compared to the enamel of a tooth,” Lukatskaya explains. “It protects the metallic lithium from continuous reaction with electrolyte components.”

Without it, the electrolyte would quickly get depleted during cycling, the cell would fail, and the lack of a stable layer would result in the formation of lithium metal whiskers—’dendrites’—during the recharging process instead of a conformal flat layer.

Should these dendrites touch the positive electrode, this would cause a short circuit with the risk that the battery heats up so much that it ignites. The ability to control the properties of this protective layer is therefore crucial for battery performance. A stable protective layer increases battery efficiency, safety and service life.

Minimizing fluorine content

“The question was how to reduce the amount of added fluorine without compromising the protective layer’s stability,” says doctoral student Nathan Hong. The group’s new method uses electrostatic attraction to achieve the desired reaction. Here, electrically charged fluorinated molecules serve as a vehicle to transport the fluorine to the protective layer.

This means that only 0.1% by weight of fluorine is required in the liquid electrolyte, which is at least 20 times lower than in prior studies.

Optimized method makes batteries greener

One of the biggest challenges was to find the right molecule to which fluorine could be attached and that would also decompose again under the right conditions once it had reached the lithium metal.

As the group explains, a key advantage of this method is that it can be seamlessly integrated into the existing battery production process without generating additional costs to change the production setup.

The batteries used in the lab were the size of a coin. In a next step, the researchers plan to test the method’s scalability and apply it to pouch cells as used in smartphones.

France’s Eramet (ERMT.PA), opens new tab aims to start production at its new Centenario lithium plant in Argentina in November and ramp up to 24,000 metric tons of battery grade lithium by mid-2025, it said on Wednesday after starting the final test phase at the plant.

The $870 million plant, a joint venture with Chinese nickel and steel giant Tsingshan, is likely to be among the first worldwide to use an innovative processing system called direct lithium extraction, or DLE, at commercial scale.

That makes it a key test for the promising technology that helps speed up lithium production even as governments and car makers race to secure supply of the ultra-light metal needed for many of the batteries that power electric vehicles.

Argentina, which sits in South America’s so-called “lithium triangle,” is the world’s fourth largest producer of the metal and is looking to rev up output with a slate of new projects set to come online later this year.

Eramet’s Centenario project, in northern Salta province, is set to be the first to start production, with the company now testing the equipment and production processes in a key phase known as commissioning.

Eramet, which owns 50.1% of the project, is requesting permits for a second plant with a capacity of 30,000 tons, with construction likely to begin next year. It plans to eventually build a third plant of the same size.

The company is hopeful that a recent new economic reform bill passed in Argentina’s Senate that includes plans to incentivize large investments, including tax sweeteners and ease of access to currency exchange markets, could help boost those expansion plans.

“The most important for us is the free currency exchange, the freedom to bring dollars to get dollars out,” said Eramet CEO Christel Bories in an interview with Reuters.