Lithium News

While we are impatiently waiting for Tesla, Rivian, and others to bring their electric pickup trucks to market here in North America, China is already getting some.

Nissan is launching a new electric pickup truck through a Dongfeng joint venture in China: the Dongfeng Rich 6 EV.

With its aggressive zero-emission mandate, China has forced automakers to accelerate their deployment of all-electric vehicles in the country.

Several of them are now making EVs just for the Chinese market.

Nissan is one of them and with their joint venture with state-owned Dongfeng, they are launching an all-electric version of their Dongfeng Rich pickup truck.

The gasoline version is based on Nissan’s pickup truck platform and it has been converted to an electric powertrain.

The Dongfeng Rich 6 EV is relatively compact (5290/1850/1790 wth a 3050 wheelbase) wth a small bed (1510/1562/475) and it has curb weight of 1,983 kg (4,370 lbs) with a max load of 490 kg (1,080 lbs).

Its double cabin can seat 5 people.

As for the powertrain, it is equipped with a single 160 hp/420 Nm electric motor and a 68 kWh battery pack.

Dongfeng claims a range of 403 km (250 miles) on a single charge, but that’s using the NEDC standard, which is generally nowhere near a normal use case.

The top speed is 110 km/h (68 mph) and the company says that it is fast-charging capable. Without confirming the max charge rate, Dongfeng says that it takes 45 minutes to get to 80% state-of-charge.

The Dongfeng Rich 6 EV should hit the market as soon as next month. The price is unknown, but it is expected to be extremely cheap — maybe even 130,000 yuan ($18,900 USD) after subsidies.

New battery company SVOLT Energy Technology Co. Ltd, whose precursor was the Battery Business Unit of Great Wall Motor Co. Ltd, introduced its cobalt-free lithium-ion battery cell (NMx) and four-element lithium-ion battery cell (NCMA).

In the product launch event, Yang Hongxin, General Manager of SVOLT, said that the NMx battery cell rivals the NCM811 cell in performance, while reducing the cost of materials by 5%-15% and the cell balance of materials (BOM) cost by around 5%, and allows the materials to rise above strategic resources.

The NCMA material not only outperforms NCM811 in cycle life, but also exhibits better resistance to heat, the ability to generate less gas and greater safety, which translates into higher capacity, longer cycle life and better safety performance in the final products, the company claimed.

Based on a global mindset, SVOLT also announced its plan to build a base in Europe. Two billion euros ($2.24 million) will be invested to build a 24GWh battery factory, a factory for cathode materials and a battery technology center. It will also integrate its 6 manufacturing bases around the globe into its AI factory construction plan.

SVOLT is primarily focused on the electric vehicle battery business, embracing an open supply to automakers around the world. Since its establishment, SVOLT has been committed to the product development based on the high-speed stacking technology of prismatic batteries and automotive grade standardization.

The high-speed stacking process is the new generation of battery technology that breaks the bottleneck of winding processes of batteries. SVOLT aims to finish stacking one cell in 0.25 seconds in one single station. In contrast to the same type of winding process, the energy density of SVOLT stacking batteries improves 5%, the cycle life improves 10% and the cost reduces 15%.

SVOLT started its cell pre-research work in 2012, and became independent in February, 2018.

SVOLT plans for 7 R&D centers around the globe, with four currently in operation, in Baoding, Korea, Shanghai and India, and three are under construction in the US, Japan and Wuxi. Domestically, SVOLT’s factory is under construction in Changzhou, Jiangsu, which will be operational by the end of 2019 with SOP in February 2020, and will have a capacity of 12GWh in 2020.

The battery cell manufacturer SVOLT Energy Technology, which emerged from the Chinese car manufacturer Great Wall, has presented a cobalt-free lithium-ion battery cell (NMx) and the four-element lithium-ion battery cell (NCMA).

According to the company, the cobalt-free NMx cell from the up-and-coming battery manufacturer is no less powerful than an NCM-811 cell. At the same time, the material costs are to be reduced by 5 to 15 per cent and the unit costs of the cells by up to 5 per cent. SVOLT did not mention any further details such as the materials used or the structure of the cell – nor a date for the market launch.

The NCMA cells are also expected to outperform the NCM-811 cells in many areas. According to SVOLT, they have a longer service life, better heat resistance and should be safer, which should result in a higher capacity at battery level with improved durability and safety. Again, the company does not provide any other data – such as how much aluminium is added to the cathode or how much cobalt is still present.

For NCMA cathodes, aluminium is added to the usual mixture of nickel, cobalt and manganese. The nickel content can increase to up to 90 per cent, which would further reduce the proportion of controversial materials such as cobalt. An NCM-811 cathode still contains ten per cent cobalt.

However, what SVOLT officially confirmed at the Baoding event is the recently leaked plans to build a plant in Europe. Last week it was reported that the construction of the European plant, the exact location of which has not yet been determined, should start in the second half of 2020 and be completed in 2022. Now the company has announced an investment of two billion euros in the construction of the 24 GWh factory. However, an exact location has still not been mentioned.

‘Recycling of lithium-ion batteries is happening on a much larger scale than most people realise,’ according to London-based consultancy firm Circular Energy Storage.

Upwards of 97 000 tonnes of lithium-ion batteries were recycled in 2018. Around 67 000 tonnes were recycled in China and 18 000 tonnes in South Korea. Besides, more than 1 GWh of second-life batteries serve as back-up solutions, energy storage and portable devices.

This suggests a far higher recycling rate than the 2-7% typically cited by researchers and journalists, says Hans Eric Melin, director of Circular Energy Storage. ‘We know from our data (based on input from 50+ leading battery recyclers worldwide) that almost 100 000 tonnes of waste batteries were recycled last year. That’s about 50% of the volume that reached end-of-life.’

Melin points out the ‘average’ recycling rate of 5% is based on ‘obsolete’ data from a 2010 report by Friends of the Earth. This figure is still being recycled to this day, the battery specialist argues.

Meanwhile, the global lithium-ion battery market will be worth approximately US$ 105 billion by 2025, reports Adroit Market Research. In China alone, some 10 billion lithium-ion batteries were produced in 2017. This grew to 12 billion last year. The surge is largely due to strong growth in the electronics and automotive sector.

The smartphone era is only just over a decade old, but the pocket-sized computers at the heart of that societal transformation are only really possible because of another technology: lithium-ion batteries.

First sold commercially in 1991 by Sony for its camcorders, these types of batteries are good for much more than portable consumer electronics. They’re at the center of two other technological revolutions with the power to transform society: the transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, and the shift from an electric grid powered by fossil fuels to renewable energy generators that store surplus electricity in batteries for future use.

So how do these batteries work? Scientists and engineers have spent entire careers trying to build better batteries and there are still mysteries that we don’t fully understand. Improving batteries requires chemists and physicists to look at changes on the atomic level, as well as mechanical and electrical engineers who can design and assemble the battery packs that power devices. As a materials scientist at the University of Washington and Pacific Northwest National Lab, my work has helped explore new materials for lithium-air batteries, magnesium batteries and of course lithium-ion batteries.

Let’s consider a day in the life of two electrons. We’ll name one of them Alex and he has a friend named George.

Battery anatomy

Alex lives inside a standard alkaline AA battery, like in your flashlight or remote control. Inside a AA battery, there is a compartment filled with zinc and another filled with manganese oxide. At one end, the zinc only weakly hangs onto electrons like Alex. On the other end, the manganese oxide powerfully pulls electrons toward itself. In between, stopping the electrons from going directly from one side to another, is a piece of paper soaked in a solution of potassium and water, which coexist as positive potassium ions and negative hydroxide ions.

When the battery is put into a device and switched on, the device’s internal circuit is completed. Alex gets pulled out of the zinc, through the circuit and into the manganese oxide. Along the way, his movement powers the device, or light bulb or whatever is connected to the battery. When Alex leaves, he can’t come back: The zinc that has lost an electron bonds with the hydroxide to form zinc oxide. This compound is extremely stable and cannot easily be converted back into zinc.

On the other side of the battery, the manganese oxide gains an oxygen atom from the water and leaves hydroxide ions behind to balance out the hydroxide being consumed by the zinc. Once all of Alex’s neighbors have left the zinc and moved to the manganese oxide, the battery is exhausted and needs to be recycled.

Lithium-ion advantages

Let’s compare this to George, who lives in a lithium-ion battery. Lithium-ion batteries have the same basic building blocks as alkaline AA cells, with a few differences that confer major advantages.

George lives in graphite, which is even weaker than zinc at holding onto electrons. And the other part of his battery is lithium cobalt oxide, which pulls electrons much more powerfully than manganese oxide – which gives his battery the ability to store much more energy in the same amount of space than an alkaline battery. The solution separating the graphite and lithium cobalt oxide contains positively charged lithium ions, which easily form and break chemical bonds as the battery is discharged and recharged.

Those chemical reactions are reversible, unlike the formation of zinc oxide, which is what lets the electrons and the lithium ions flow back and forth over many cycles of charging and discharging.

This process isn’t 100% efficient, though – all batteries eventually lose their ability to hold energy. Nevertheless, the family of Li-ion chemistries have been powerful enough to dominate battery technology today.

New homes in the UK could all be fitted with electric car charging points in the future, as the UK government has outlined a number of EV-supportive proposals in a public consultation on England’s building regulations.

The UK is promoting the legislation as the first of its kind in the world as it moves to increase electric vehicle adoption. Sales of new petrol and diesel cars are set to end in the UK by 2040, and there’s been talk about moving that deadline up earlier, to 2030 or 2035.

The government is also looking for all “newly installed rapid and higher powered chargepoints” to offer debit or credit card payment options by spring 2020.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said of the proposed home charging initiative:

“With record levels of ultra-low emission vehicles on our roads, it is clear there is an appetite for cleaner, greener transport.

Home charging provides the most convenient and low-cost option for consumers – you can simply plug your car in to charge overnight as you would a mobile phone.”

The government looks to prioritize smart charging for all new private EV chargers, as well. A recent study by UK energy system operator National Grid ESO outlined a scenario that would see 35 million EVs using smart charging technology to store large amounts of renewable electricity by that time.

The full proposal for home charging points details that:

We propose specifying that the chargepoints must have a minimum power rating output of 7kW, be fitted with a universal socket that can charge all types of electric vehicle currently on the market and meet relevant safety and accessibility requirements.

In addition to the home charging requirement, other recommended policy positions include:

• The government proposes every new non-residential building and every non-residential building undergoing a major renovation with more than ten car parking spaces to have one chargepoint and cable routes for an electric vehicle chargepoint for one in five spaces.
• The government proposes a requirement of at least one chargepoint in existing non-residential buildings with more than 20 car parking spaces, applicable from 2025.

The UK is aiming for net zero emissions by 2050, and electric vehicles are seen as a major key to hitting that target.