Lithium News

Another day, another battery gigafactory announcement

Lithium Werks, a Dutch energy storage company, is the latest who would like to catch onto the growing demand for lithium-ion batteries and announced a battery gigafactory project.

The idea is to build a new plant in China for €1.6 billion ($1.85 billion). We believe that the majority of the investment will come from partners of Lithium Werks.

The project scale would be just the beginning, as by 2030 company would like to have installed production capacity for 500 GWh annually.

Earlier this year Lithium Werks acquired the original A123 Systems manufacturing plants (for cylindrical cells) located in Changzhou, China. The other acquisition was Valence Technology (“including the customer relationships, global manufacturing, sales and distribution locations along with all of Valence’s Proprietary Lithium Magnesium Iron Phosphate intellectual property (IP), trademarks, and inventory”).

Press release

€1.6bn investment project kickstarts Lithium Werks’ battery gigafactories vision

Dutch energy storage and battery company Lithium Werks B.V. (www.lithiumwerks.com) and Chinese Zhejiang Jiashan Economic and Technological Development Zone Industry Corporation have signed a framework agreement with the intention to construct a 60 hectares battery gigafactory in the Yangtze river Delta. Total investments required are estimated at €1.6 billion.

The Lithium Werks factory and related facilities will produce battery cells for lithium-ion batteries, enabling the energy transition from fossil fuels to clean energy in order to reduce CO2 emissions.

Lithium Werks expects to have installed production capacity of 500 GWh per annum by 2030 as it continues to contribute to the shift to a carbon neutral world.

“With our Chinese partners’ help, and as we continue to grow both organically and through acquisitions, we will deliver the energy storage solutions that our customers increasingly ask for as the world transitions to clean energy,” said Koolen.

“We need safe, reliable, clean and sustainable energy storage. Batteries are an essential part of the energy transition. They enable us to store wind and solar energy to make it available whenever people need electricity,” said Kees Koolen, chairman of the board, Lithium Werks.

The agreement, which was signed in the presence of the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, marks the start of Lithium Werks’ plan to build multiple gigafactories across the world as part of a 15-to-20-year program that mirrors the long-term business models of the wind and solar industry.

Lithium Werks expects its revenue to exceed $1bn by 2020 as it continues to grow its share of the rapidly expanding market for energy storage.

During the next decade alone, we can expect demand for lithium-ion batteries to grow tenfold.* The battery industry will need to respond by constructing factories to deliver capacity in excess of 10,000 GWh in the next three decades.

“We are grateful and happy to work with our Chinese partners, the first to support our strategy to have a factory in their country. Speed of execution is key as is evidenced by building permit and other regulatory processes in China being completed within 100 days. Other countries and partners are invited to take up the dialogue in order to accelerate the roll out in other locations. We work closely with our customers to meet their specific energy storage requirements and are excited to develop new business relationships.” said Koolen.

Lithium Werks is committed to providing energy storage solutions that make electricity generated from renewable energy available when consumer need it, thus facilitating the global transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.

Lithium Werks is working closely with the regional development organisation Oost NL, which has invested in the company, and with the University of Twente, with which it is developing a research campus that by around 2025 will employ some 2,000 engineers and other experts to focus on energy storage, transport and smart software.

“Significant investments are needed for an actual energy transition. The Chinese government has been working on clean energy plans for some time and their commitment confirms the crucial role that batteries play in this,” said Victor van der Chijs, rector of the University of Twente.

“Lithium Werks, with the University of Twente as a research partner, is an important player with a clear vision for a sustainable world. The University of Twente has been investing in sustainable energy research for years, including research into new materials that enable further innovation in battery technology,” he said.

Marius Prins, CEO, Oost NL said: “These developments show that Lithium Werks can grow into a company that makes an important contribution worldwide to the way we handle energy and energy storage. As the development company, we were among the first to invest in Lithium Werks. We firmly believe that Lithium Werks’ energy research R&D activities will contribute significantly to the strength of East Netherlands’ economy.”

 *)  Capgemini Research Institute, 2018

Lithium-ion will be the major battery technology for the next few years.

But plenty of challengers are on the horizon and battery metal investors are watching closely to see which technology could be next to benefit from electric vehicle and energy storage demand.

So what are the future options?

In terms of electric vehicle batteries, at the moment it’s more about refining the chemical make-up of a lithium-ion battery rather than moving to another type of battery.

“The immediate progress you are likely to see in battery technology is towards advanced lithium-ion technologies which are maximising the performance of existing chemistries,” Benchmark Mineral Intelligence senior analyst Andrew Miller told Stockhead.

Electric car makers are focusing on two chemistries: nickel-cobalt-aluminium (NCA) and nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM or NMC).

American car giant Tesla prefers NCA, while the NCM chemistry is more popular among its rivals.

Car and battery makers are reducing the amount of cobalt they use because it is one of the most expensive parts of a battery and there is a shortage of the commodity.

Cobalt is mainly used to make the cathode in lithium-ion batteries.

Benchmark Mineral Intelligence predicts that by 2026, NCM batteries will account for about 70 per cent of the total lithium-ion battery market.

Right now most EVs use the NMC622 battery technology, which stands for six parts of nickel to one part each of manganese and cobalt, but there’s a drive towards the NMC811 battery technology.

“NCM811 and NCA are very similar cathode chemistries and the battery market is already pushing towards these technologies,” Mr Miller said.

“Tesla have already successfully commercialised NCA and a number of other companies are looking to follow in their footsteps.

“NCM chemistries are more widely used today and there is already a shift towards 811, but this is posing a challenge to producers in terms of lifecycle, so the shift will be more gradual with 622 the target for most in the near-term and gradually working towards 811 over the next one to three years.”

China’s biggest lithium battery maker – the $150 billion Contemporary Amperex Technology – is already making plans to switch to NMC811.

More nickel makes batteries cheaper and longer lasting because it can store and produce more energy.

At the moment CATL produces batteries containing 50 per cent nickel, 20 per cent cobalt and 30 per cent manganese – or NCM523.

CATL supplies batteries to electric car makers SAIC Motor Corp, Geely, BMW and Volkswagen.

Marcel Goldenberg, a battery metals specialist for S&P Global Platts, sees the NMC811 technology becoming commercially viable in the next three to five years.

New contenders

Benchmark’s Mr Miller says the natural successor to lithium-ion technologies looks set to be solid-state batteries which is where a lot of companies are focusing their investments for EV applications.

“In terms of solid-state, this continues to offer the light-weight benefits of lithium-ion and can also provide increased energy density which is a crucial target for EV applications,” he explained.

Solid state technology is harder to engineer — but promises a lower-cost battery that is higher capacity, higher density, higher performance and quicker to charge.

Mr Miller doesn’t expect solid-state batteries to be a “significant part of the market until post-2025”.

But battery makers say solid-state batteries are much closer to becoming a reality.

Graphite miner Magnis Resources (ASX:MNS) revealed earlier in October that its partner, battery maker C4V, had developed one of the world’s first solid-state batteries.

The new battery, which was unveiled at a conference in New York, replaces more than 80 per cent of the usual liquid electrolyte with a solid electrolyte. C4V’s battery also does not require cobalt.

C4V reckons it could be producing prototypes for customers by as early as the second quarter of next year.

Meanwhile, other potential choices are lithium sulphur and lithium air batteries.

The International Energy Agency sees both Li-Air and Li-Sulphur becoming available from 2030.

But French market researcher Avicenne Energy predicts Li-Sulphur could be available before 2025.

Scientists from the Drexel University College of Engineering in Philadelphia recently made a breakthrough in stabilising a Li-Sulphur battery.

They think they have found a way to make a Li-Sulphur battery with four times the capacity of a similarly sized lithium-ion battery.

“Our Li-S electrodes provide the right architecture and chemistry to minimise capacity fade during battery cycling, a key impediment in commercialisation of Li-S batteries,” said Vibha Kalra, an associate professor in the College of Engineering who led the research.

“Our research shows that these electrodes exhibit a sustained effective capacity that is four-times higher than the current Li-ion batteries. And our novel, low-cost method for sulphurising the cathode in just seconds removes a significant impediment for manufacturing.”

What about energy storage?

While the EV space is firmly dominated by lithium-ion for the moment, stationary storage is more diverse.

Stationary storage systems are big batteries designed to store excess power from the power grid — including from renewable sources — for use during expensive peak demand periods.

There are a couple of battery technologies vying for top spot, but the spotlight is largely on vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs).

“The area where you are likely to see far more variation in battery technologies is stationary storage applications where you don’t need the light-weight benefits of a lithium-based technology,” Mr Miller said.

“While we still expect lithium-ion to play a big role in this market there will be several other technologies that compete for market share in this space.

“In particular vanadium flow seems a strong contender for stationary storage but there are several steps the industry has to overcome before it can reach wide-spread commercialisation.”

Benchmark predicts that by 2028, 50 per cent of the burgeoning stationary storage market will be lithium-ion, and 25 per cent will be VRFBs.

VRFBs are regarded as a safer alternative to lithium-ion and better suited to large-scale applications.

They come at a higher upfront cost but have a far longer life compared to lithium-ion batteries.

“For stationary storage, vanadium flow is very interesting because of the life-cycle advantages and the fact that the input raw materials can be reused,” Mr Miller said.

China leans towards vanadium

While lithium-ion is now the favoured technology in China, the Asian powerhouse is looking at several types of batteries as it works out the best option for grid-scale energy storage.

David Gillam, the boss of Mastermines – a specialist company that has strong ties to China and helps Australian miners with marketing and securing off-take deals, says Chinese players are looking in every direction.

“We sort of have an idea that they may be moving more towards vanadium for big installations but there’s not enough proof yet that that’s the case,” he told Stockhead earlier in October.

“It’s very early days and it’s typical of China, they’re going to test everything.”

Other battery technologies that are being advanced include the zinc air battery – a tech that was developed by researchers from the University of Sydney.

Although a zinc air battery is cheaper than a lithium-ion battery it is not as efficient and is probably better suited to domestic energy storage than large-scale energy storage.

US scientists, meanwhile, have discovered a way to stop sodium batteries from exploding and make them hold a charge more effectively.

Sodium is a very cheap and abundant alternative to lithium.

Sodium-ion batteries would be physically heavier than lithium-ion, which makes them an unlikely replacement in electric car batteries.

But researchers have been investigating the alternative because they could store energy for large solar and wind power facilities at a lower cost.

If you own an electric car, one of your biggest road trip challenges is finding a charging station. This week Google made that process a bit easier when it added EV charging station information to Google Maps.

In order to find one near you, just do a normal search within the app for either “EV Charging” or “EV Charging Stations,” when you do, Google will show you the nearest stations to you. It will also show you information about the business where the station is located, the kinds of ports available, the charging speed, and how many charging ports are available. Specifically supporting these types of chargers:

• Global: Tesla, Chargepoint
• US: SemaConnect, EVgo, Blink
• UK: Chargemaster, Pod Point
• AU & NZ: Chargefox

Just like other businesses on Google, visitors to a charging location can also leave ratings and reviews just like the can for restaurants as well as photos.

The feature is rolling out to Google Maps on iOs and Android now. If you don’t have it, make sure you have the latest version of Google Maps installed on your device.

The switch to electric cars is speeding up. There are two forces driving this. One is legal or regulatory controls, the other the falling cost of batteries. Some words about each, and then some conclusions.

The spate of legal moves against petrol and diesel vehicles has become an avalanche. Here are just a handful of them. There is a move in parliament to bring forward the date in the UK when all new vehicles will be zero emission from 2040 to 2032 – Norway has pledged to do so by 2025 and India by 2030. In Germany older diesel cars are to be banned from the centre of Hamburg and, more remarkably, from Stuttgart. Stuttgart is Germany’s motor town, home to Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Porsche. True, these are older cars, but the signal is clear: regulations will tighten up on polluting vehicles. In the UK the City of London plans a zero-emission zone as part of an effort to improve air quality. A vote will be taken on this at the end of this month.

In the US, regulatory progress has been slow but earlier this year the governor of California, Jerry Brown, set a goal of having 5 million electric cars in the state by 2030. The US is, however, a pioneer in that most of its electric vehicle sales are pure plugins rather than hybrids – a tribute to Elon Musk and his Tesla brand.

But the largest and most important car market in the world is China. Here things are moving very fast indeed. All manufacturers will have to have at least one electric vehicle by 2020, and forecasters see this as a trigger for explosive growth.

If it were simply regulation that was pushing the shift it would happen quite slowly. But economics are now reinforcing it. In a nutshell, electric vehicle batteries are expensive but the drive trains are cheap. They simply have electric motors. Internal combustion engine vehicles, by contrast, don’t have the huge batteries but they have extremely complex (and expensive) drive trains – the engine, the clutch, the gearbox and so on. A Tesla has about 150 moving parts, whereas a typical internal combustion engine has several thousand. The batteries in a pure electric car are still the most expensive item. It is estimated that those in a Tesla Model 3 cost $13,000 (£9,950) to make.

But that is coming down. Bloomberg New Energy Finance calculates that we are about seven years away from the crossover point when electric cars become cheaper to build than comparable internal combustion engine ones.

Not to mention the other practical advantages – they are cheaper to maintain and service and there is less to go wrong – and there will not need to be tax advantages or legal controls. The market will have made the internal combustion engine obsolete, at least for road transport. The great question then will become: how fast will the switch be?

It varies a bit from country to country but the average age of a car in the UK before it is scrapped is 14 years. So even if most of the world’s car production had switched to electric in another decade, which is almost unthinkably ambitious, it would still be more than 25 years before the majority of cars on the road were electric. Just building the infrastructure to fuel the world’s fleet is a huge challenge. And whereas many uses of electricity are becoming much more efficient – lighting, air conditioning for example – the need for energy in transport is determined by the basic laws of physics. Improvements in efficiency will happen, but there are limits as to what can be achieved.

So reason says that the switch will be slow. But once electric cars become cheaper to buy than diesel or petrol ones, and of course remain cheaper to run, then maybe things will move faster than any of us expect. Economics will once again have trumped inertia.

You may not have heard of neodymium, but you’re probably carrying some of it around with you right now. It’s in your cellphone, your headphones and you might be driving several pounds of it around in your car.

Neodymium — pronounced “nee-oh-DIM-ee-um” — is one of 17 chemically similar elements called rare earth elements, and demand for this metal is on the rise.

“Neodymium is responsible for most, if not all, of the growth in rare earth demand at the moment,” said Roderick Eggert, deputy director of the Critical Materials Institute at Colorado School of Mines.

For an iPhone to vibrate, for AirPods to play music, for wind turbines to generate power and for a Toyota Prius or Tesla Model 3’s motor to spin, they need powerful magnets. If you combine neodymium with iron and boron, you can make a neodymium-iron-boron magnet, which is the most powerful type of permanent magnet ever created.

In the case of your cellphone and earbuds, using neodymium magnets means they can be physically tiny but still strong. For motors, using permanent magnets means powerful, efficient motors with fewer electromagnetic components.

Magnets might seem trivial and most useful for sticking things on your fridge, but according to market research group IMARC, the neodymium-iron-boron magnet market was worth $11.3 billion in 2017.

“In a couple of decades we’re forecast to have a million electric vehicles on the road in the U.S. and that’s going to cause demand of neodymium to surge,” said Michael Kanko, CEO of Import Genius.

Earlier this year, Tesla became one of several electric car makers to use motors with neodymium magnets. It’s installing them in its Tesla Model 3.

Tesla imported over four million pounds of automotive parts from China and Taiwan and the bulk of that is neodymium-magnet electric motors, Kanko said.

But demand for the rare earth metal is outstripping supply by about 3,000 tons per year, said Julie Klinger, the author of “Rare Earth Frontiers.”

Today, that supply is coming from China. More than 80 percent of the world’s neodymium is produced there. In 2017 alone, China mined 105,000 metric tons of rare earth metals, while the U.S. has only produced about 43,000 metric tons in the last 20 years combined.

“The United States used to be the most important single producing country for rare earths, from a single mine called the Mountain Pass mine in southern California near the border with Nevada,” said Eggert. “In the 1960s and 70s, this mine was the dominant rare earth mine in the world. But as Chinese mines were developed in the 1980s and 90s, they gradually drove the Mountain Pass mine out of business.”

Around the same time that was happening, China was investing deeply in its own rare earth metal mining and production and succeeded. From the late 1990s to 2010, China became the dominant player and it now controls the majority of the market, said Kanko.

The risks involved in relying so significantly on a single source for such a valuable commodity were illustrated during a trade dispute between China and Japan in 2010. The price per metric ton jumped from $50,000 in 2010 to $250,000 in 2011, Klinger said.

While the price has since come back down, concerns remain. Toyota, for example, recently developed a new neodymium-reduced magnet, citing concerns about neodymium shortages.

Earlier this year, rare earths narrowly avoided being included on a new list of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. In the original $200 billion proposed tranche of Chinese tariffs, neodymium and other rare earths were on that list.

“Interestingly, the final list of 6,000 Chinese products that were targeted, neodymium and other metals were exempted,” Kanko said. “It shows how important metals are to the U.S. economy and shows we’re concerned about it.”

These elements are so important, that the U.S. is going to start producing rare earths again. Mountain Pass mine was recently bought out of bankruptcy by two U.S. investment firms called MP Materials. The company says that it wants to “rebuild a rare earth industry in America.”

And while MP Materials still has to ship material to China for further refinement, a source close to the company said that it plans to be fully self-sufficient in the U.S. within 18 months.

Historically though, extracting and processing these materials has had environmental consequences.

“If you want to open an neodymium mine you’re going to bring up a whole bunch of other elements with it alongside neodymium…sometimes uranium” said Klinger. “It’s very difficult to open a mine in a particular place without destroying the landscapes and livelihoods that were previously there.”

But Klinger is optimistic that as demand continues to rise, better processes will be implemented.

“One of the things that is good about the projected increase in demand for neodymium is that we will likely see a diversification of neodymium supply,” Klinger said. “My hope is with that we will also see increased international cooperation around recycling and reclaiming neodymium from spent electronic motors.”

Audi’s first electric sport utility vehicle (SUV) will hit showrooms four weeks later than planned because of a software development issue, a spokesman for the German luxury car brand said on Sunday.

The spokesman said Audi’s e-tron midsize SUV faced delay because the carmaker needs new regulatory clearance for a piece of software that was modified during the development process.

Audi staged a global launch of the e-tron in San Francisco last month as part of its effort to expand the market for premium electric vehicles and grab a share from California-based Tesla, which has had the niche largely to itself.

The e-tron delays were first reported by German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, citing sources close to the company. The paper said delivery could be delayed by several months.

The paper also said Audi was locked in price negotiations with LG Chem, the South-Korean supplier of batteries for its electric vehicles, which wants to increase prices by about 10 percent because of high demand.

LG Chem supplies electric vehicle batteries for Audi, its parent Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) and Daimler.

An LG Chem official declined to comment on the report, citing the confidentiality of its relationship with a client.

The Audi spokesman also declined to comment on price negotiations with LG Chem.