Lithium News

SK Innovation announced Wednesday that it will build a plant that manufactures lithium-ion battery separator (LiBS), the main material for electric vehicles, in Silesia, Poland. This is the third LiBS manufacturing site following the Jeungpyeong plant in North Chungcheong Province, Korea and the Changzhou plant in Jiangsu Province, China, which is currently under construction.

The annual production volume of the new factory in Poland will be 340 million square meters with an investment of some 430 billion won. SK Innovation also plans to expand the Jeungpyeong plan from an annual production amount of 360 million square meters to 530 million square meters by the end of November this year. When the expansion of the Jeungpyeong plant and the construction of plants in China and Poland are completed, the total annual production amount will increase to 1.21 billion square meters.

“When the construction for expansion and new plants is completed, we will be able to catch up with Japanese materials supplier Asahi Kasei Corp., which is the largest market for LiBS,” said an official from SK Innovation.

SK Innovation is also planning to equip itself with a mass production facility by investing 40 billion won into Jeungpyeong plant following the completion of constructing a plant for manufacturing “FCW,” which is the key material for foldable phones at the Technology Innovation Research Center in Daejeon. FCW is a material for foldable, flexible, and rollable display that are recently gaining attention. It has been said to be attached to part of the foldable phone that was released at the MWC 2019 held in Barcelona, Spain in February.

“The story of the oversupply suppressed the lithium price and the [share] price of the junior miners in the sector,” he said

“People believed there really was an oversupply issue and prices did come off.”

Lake Resources has a market capitalisation of $20 million and has four lithium projects in the “golden triangle” of Argentina that are pre-production or exploration areas. The company is looking for an industry consumer or battery maker to support development of its Kachi lithium project, which would see it emulate Orocobre’s partnership with Toyota and Panasonic.

Our readers are nothing if not Tesla fans.

After Tesla introduced its more-affordable SUV, the Model Y, earlier this month, we revisited the question of which electric SUV on the market our readers would be most interested in buying.

It was one of the most popular polls we’ve posted in months, with over 2,700 responses, and the results were overwhelming: 81 percent of our readers would choose the Model Y.

Based on the Model 3, the Model Y is a relatively conventional electric SUV with about 290 to 300 miles of range in top trim, and is expected to start at about $40,000. It has conventional rear doors and will offer an optional, tiny, forward-facing third-row seat.

That formula seems to fit the bill for our readers. Some commenters have even suggested canceling their Model 3 orders and waiting for the Model Y, which is expected to roll out late next year.

Other choices in our Twitter poll included the Hyundai Kona Electric, Hyundai’s newest offering, which is rated at 258 miles of range and has debuted to rave reviews, although so far it is only available in California and Oregon, and is slowly rolling out to other states. Hyundai only offers the Kona Electric in front-wheel-drive form, so whether it qualifies as an SUV depends on readers’ perspectives. Only 8 percent of our readers, however, said they’d choose a Kona.

The other choices included the Jaguar I-Pace, which is already on the market, and splits the difference in price between the $40,000 Tesla Model Y, and the nearly $100,000 Model X. With only 234 miles of estimated range—and fewer in many real-world driving reports. The somewhat higher price was offset in our poll by the fact that it’s widely available. The I-Pace, however, garnered only 5 percent of our readers’ votes.

The final choice, the Audi e-tron quattro, is not quite available on the market (and neither is the Model Y), but is expected to be by mid-year, with a price just shy of $80,000 and a range not yet rated. It earned slightly more votes at 6 percent.

Nothing but the Model Y broke out of single digits, however.

This poll may have had enough responses to create a scientific study—if only our respondents were randomly selected from a nationally representative sample. But our respondents are self-selected, and as the results show, they have a particular bent.

China makes up about half of the global electric vehicle market largely as a result of heavy subsidies on both the supply and demand side, so any time the government changes policy, it has broad implications. And China just dropped a whopper of a change in policy.

As Bloomberg reports, the central government is going to dramatically scale back subsidies to EV companies and have also urged local governments to stop subsidizing purchases as well. From Bloomberg:

The subsidy for pure battery electric cars with a driving range of 400 kilometers (250 miles) and above will be cut by half, to 25,000 yuan ($3,700) per vehicle from 50,000 yuan, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement on its website Tuesday. To qualify for any subsidy, electric cars need to have a range of at least 250 kilometers, compared with 150 kilometers previously, the ministry said.

Why is China doing this? Here’s what the Ministry of Finance says, per Bloomberg:

The move aims to support “high-quality development of a new-energy automobile industry,” the ministry said.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like the government thinks it has done enough to create a market and the subsidies are now largely going towards propping up companies that shouldn’t exist in their current form. Bloomberg says the total subsidy reduction, taking both the supply and demand side into account, will be 67 percent, far above the 40 to 50 percent anticipated.

In other words, it’s sink or swim time for Chinese EVs, or at least sink or swim with a raft filled with only about a third as much air.

The long-term cost of supplying grid electricity from today’s lithium-ion batteries is falling even faster than expected, making them an increasingly cost-competitive alternative to natural-gas-fired power plants across a number of key energy markets.

That’s the key finding from a Tuesday report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance on the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) — the cost of a technology delivering energy over its lifespan — for a number of key clean energy technologies worldwide.

According to its analysis of public and proprietary data from more than 7,000 projects worldwide, this benchmark LCOE for lithium-ion batteries has fallen by 35 percent, to $187 per megawatt-hour, since the first half of 2018. This precipitous decline has outpaced the continuing slide in LCOE for solar PV and onshore and offshore wind power.

Over the past year, offshore wind saw a 24 percent decline in LCOE to fall below $100 per megawatt-hour, compared to about $220 per megawatt-hour only five years ago. The benchmark LCOE for onshore wind and solar PV fell by 10 percent and 18 percent, respectively, to reach $50 and $57 per megawatt-hour for projects starting construction in early 2019.

To be sure, these generation technologies are still far cheaper than batteries in terms of their LCOEs — and that’s not mentioning the fact that they actually make electricity, rather than simply storing it for later use. To convert a battery’s storage capacity into a LCOE figure, the report models a utility-scale battery installation running daily cycles, with charging costs assumed to be at 60 percent of the wholesale base power price for the country in question.

Even so, the pace of the decline in battery LCOE, particularly for multi-hour storage applications that previous generations of lithium-ion technologies have struggled to provide, is startling, BNEF notes. Since 2012, the benchmark LCOE of lithium-ion batteries configured to supply four hours of grid power — a standard requirement for many grid services — has fallen by 74 percent, as extrapolated from historical data.

In comparison, the LCOE per megawatt-hour for onshore wind, solar PV and offshore wind has fallen by 49 percent, 84 percent and 56 percent, respectively, since 2010.

In fact, the LCOE for multi-hour lithium-ion batteries is falling to the point that “batteries co-located with solar or wind projects are starting to compete, in many markets and without subsidy, with coal- and gas-fired generation for the provision of ‘dispatchable power’ that can be delivered whenever the grid needs it (as opposed to only when the wind is blowing, or the sun is shining),” the report notes.

These findings match those we’ve been covering from our own analysts at Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, as well as from the broader industry. In the past year and a half, several large-scale solar-battery requests for proposals have set record-low prices, including Xcel Energy in Colorado with solar-plus-storage bids as low as $36 per megawatt-hour, compared to $25 per megawatt-hour for standalone solar, and NV Energy reporting even lower bids in its solar and solar-plus-storage RFPs.

These price points equate to about a $6 to $7 per megawatt-hour premium for solar projects that are partially “dispatchable” in the manner of a traditional power plant, compared to standalone solar, Ravi Manghani, WoodMac energy storage research director, reported at Greentech Media’s Energy Storage Summit in December.

Just this week, clean energy advocacy and research organization Energy Innovation and Vibrant Clean Energy released a report finding that the LCOE of new renewables in the U.S. is lower than that of nearly three-quarters of the U.S. coal fleet — a not completely surprising finding, given the coal power industry’s well-documented challenges in competing with cheap natural gas, and increasingly cheap wind and solar power.

At the same time, it’s worth noting that the current trends in pricing for lithium-ion batteries, what they actually cost today, has been mixed. While continuing technology improvements and increasing scale of manufacturing have continued to push down prices, these have been somewhat counterbalanced in the past year or so by a bottleneck in available supply, driven by a boom in demand from big projects in the U.S. and South Korea.

WoodMac discovered that battery rack prices fell by only about 6 percent from 2017 to 2018, rather than the 14 percent range previously predicted, based on these supply shortage challenges.

Chile has issued a call for bids from national and international companies interested in manufacturing value-added lithium products in the country using preferential prices.

Last year, Chilean development agency Corfo, which is in charge of Chile’s lithium reserves, ended a long-running dispute with top producer SQM (NYSE:SQM) over royalties in the Salar de Atacama, allowing the company to potentially expand its production. As part of the deal, the company agreed to supply Chile with lithium at a favorable price for a value-added program.

According to Sebastian Sichel, the head of Corfo, Chile will begin accepting proposals on April 5 and close the tender by November. A winner is expected to be announced in early January 2020.

“What we’re hoping for now is that we go beyond producing lithium carbonate and, finally, to begin generating returns at a more local level,” Sichel told reporters.

Chile is the world’s second-largest lithium producer after Australia, reaching total output of 16,000 MT in 2018. Lithium demand is set to surge in the coming years as the need for the lithium-ion batteries used to power electric cars continues to increase.

In January, Corfo resolved a contract dispute over pricing with another top lithium producer, Albemarle (NYSE:ALB). Under the deal, the company agreed to sell a quarter of its output at preferential prices to be used by companies looking to develop battery materials in Chile.

Corfo has already awarded contracts to Molymet, China’s Sichuan Fulin Industrial Group and a joint venture between Samsung SDI (KRX:006400) and South Korea’s POSCO (NYSE:PKX) to produce battery components in Chile for a total investment of US$754 million.

Researchers around the globe have been on a quest for batteries that pack a punch but are smaller and lighter than today’s versions, potentially enabling electric cars to travel further or portable electronics to run for longer without recharging. Now, researchers at MIT and in China say they’ve made a major advance in this area, with a new version of a key component for lithium batteries, the cathode.

The team describes their concept as a “hybrid” cathode, because it combines aspects of two different approaches that have been used before, one to increase the energy output per pound (gravimetric energy density), the other for the energy per liter (volumetric energy density). The synergistic combination, they say, produces a version that provides the benefits of both, and more.

The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Ju Li, an MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering and of materials science and engineering; Weijiang Xue, an MIT postdoc; and 13 others.

Today’s lithium-ion batteries tend to use cathodes (one of the two electrodes in a battery) made of a transition metal oxide, but batteries with cathodes made of sulfur are considered a promising alternative to reduce weight. Today, the designers of lithium-sulfur batteries face a tradeoff.

The cathodes of such batteries are usually made in one of two ways, known as intercalation types or conversion types. Intercalation types, which use compounds such as lithium cobalt oxide, provide a high volumetric energy density — packing a lot of punch per volume because of their high densities. These cathodes can maintain their structure and dimensions while incorporating lithium atoms into their crystalline structure.

The other cathode approach, called the conversion type, uses sulfur that gets transformed structurally and is even temporarily dissolved in the electrolyte. “Theoretically, these [batteries] have very good gravimetric energy density,” Li says. “But the volumetric density is low,” partly because they tend to require a lot of extra materials, including an excess of electrolyte and carbon, used to provide conductivity.

In their new hybrid system, the researchers have managed to combine the two approaches into a new cathode that incorporates both a type of molybdenum sulfide called Chevrel-phase, and pure sulfur, which together appear to provide the best aspects of both. They used particles of the two materials and compressed them to make the solid cathode. “It is like the primer and TNT in an explosive, one fast-acting, and one with higher energy per weight,” Li says.

Among other advantages, the electrical conductivity of the combined material is relatively high, thus reducing the need for carbon and lowering the overall volume, Li says. Typical sulfur cathodes are made up of 20 to 30 percent carbon, he says, but the new version needs only 10 percent carbon.

The net effect of using the new material is substantial. Today’s commercial lithium-ion batteries can have energy densities of about 250 watt-hours per kilogram and 700 watt-hours per liter, whereas lithium-sulfur batteries top out at about 400 watt-hours per kilogram but only 400 watt-hours per liter. The new version, in its initial version that has not yet gone through an optimization process, can already reach more than 360 watt-hours per kilogram and 581 watt-hours per liter, Li says. It can beat both lithium-ion and lithium-sulfur batteries in terms of the combination of these energy densities.

With further work, he says, “we think we can get to 400 watt-hours per kilogram and 700 watt-hours per liter,” with that latter figure equaling that of lithium-ion. Already, the team has gone a step further than many laboratory experiments aimed at developing a large-scale battery prototype: Instead of testing small coin cells with capacities of only several milliamp-hours, they have produced a three-layer pouch cell (a standard subunit in batteries for products such as electric vehicles) with a capacity of more than 1,000 milliamp-hours. This is comparable to some commercial batteries, indicating that the new device does match its predicted characteristics.

So far, the new cell can’t quite live up to the longevity of lithium-ion batteries in terms of the number of charge-discharge cycles it can go through before losing too much power to be useful. But that limitation is “not the cathode’s problem”; it has to do with the overall cell design, and “we’re working on that,” Li says. Even in its present early form, he says, “this may be useful for some niche applications, like a drone with long range,” where both weight and volume matter more than longevity.

“I think this is a new arena for research,” Li says.

The work was supported by the Samsung Advanced institute of Technology, the National Key Technologies R&D Program of China, the National Science Foundation of China, and MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The team also included professor Jing Kong and others at MIT, as well as researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory in Guangdong, China, the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology America in Burlington, Massachusetts, and Tongji University in Shanghai.