Lithium News

Panasonic, one of the world’s leading battery manufacturing companies, is expanding its manufacturing capabilities in the United States. The CR-2/3AZ lithium primary battery currently being manufactured in Indonesia will also be produced in Columbus, GA, by the end of 2018.

The CR-2/3AZ cell offers important features, including: superior reliability, up to ten years; and high current pulse discharge capability. The cell uses Manganese-based cathode material to deliver better temperature tolerance to operate in harsh environments. It is suitable for smoke alarms, C0 sensors, and meters, as well as a variety of other applications needing longer life.

“This will benefit customers in a variety of ways — including lower transportation costs and timelier customer support,” says Kanji Kawakami, Chief Engineer for OEM and Industrial Batteries. “The production shift is a testimony to an ongoing commitment to supplying customers the highest quality and broadest line of battery technologies, while addressing current market conditions.”

Panasonic is a leading supplier of batteries offering advanced cell manufacturing and product technologies, superior quality, and one of the broadest lines of primary and rechargeable batteries in the industry.

Panasonic’s product line includes lithium-ion, lithium coin, lithium primary cylindrical, nickel metal hydride, valve regulated lead acid and alkaline batteries. for more information on cylindrical lithium cells, Panasonic’s lithium cell product line (or additional Panasonic battery products) email oembatteries@us.panasonic.com,or visit na.industrial.panasonic.com/products/batteries.

Newark-based Panasonic Corp. of North America is a leading technology partner and integrator to businesses, government agencies and consumers across the region. The company is the principal North American subsidiary of Japan-based Panasonic Corp. and leverages its strengths in immersive entertainment, sustainable energy, integrated supply chains and mobility solutions to enable its business-to-business customers.

The Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission (CCHEN) refused to increase the lithium production quota for U.S.-based Albemarle Corp, which had already gotten approval for an increase from a national development agency, a local newspaper said on Saturday.

Following a request from Albemarle “for an increase of 258,446 metric tons of Metallic Lithium Equivalent … based on a declared improvement in efficiency of its operations, it was decided that the information provided was not sufficient to justify the increase,” Patricio Aguilera, executive director of CCHEN, said in a story published in the newspaper La Tercera.

The state Corporation for the Promotion of Production (Corfo) in March had authorized an increased production quota for the company after Albemarle requested an increase to 120,000/140,000 annual tons of lithium, from the 65,000/80,000 originally authorized.

As global demand for lithium heats up, Albemarle Corp is investing millions of dollars to engineer specialized types of the light metal for electric car batteries, part of a strategy to remain the niche market’s top producer.

The Chilean state agency that oversees lithium mining in the country´s Atacama salt flat is expected to decide whether to take Albemarle to arbitration in a contract dispute, an attorney for the agency said.

A lawyer for Corfo said Albemarle has failed to reply to questions about a contract the agency signed with Albemarle in 2016. The agreement grants the miner rights to extract lithium from the Salar, the world´s richest deposit of the metal.

LA PAZ – Bolivia will choose a new junior partner in the coming weeks to help industrialise its lithium deposits from among seven companies that submitted proposals, including the German firm ACI Systems, according to a government official.

The other offers to work with Bolivia to tap two lithium-rich salt flats – Coipasa and Pastos Grandes – were submitted by Chinese companies and two Russian firms, Luis Alberto Echazu, Deputy Minister of High Energy Technologies, told Reuters in an interview on Thursday.

“The evaluation will take at least two to three weeks, maybe a bit more,” Echazu said, adding that the decision could be made at the end of this month or in early November.

Bolivia is believed to have one of the largest lithium reserves in the world, but has yet to produce the metal on a large scale. President Evo Morales has sought to keep the metal, used in the production of batteries for electric cars and laptops, from being exported merely as raw material.

In April, Bolivian state lithium company YLB announced it was teaming up with privately-owned ACI Systems to develop its massive Uyuni salt flat. The project, expected to cost at least $1.2-billion, includes plans to build a lithium hydroxide plant and a factory for producing electric car batteries in Bolivia.

For Coipasa and Pastos Grandes, Bolivia is not requiring that interested companies build a battery factory in Bolivia, YLB’s manager Juan Carlos Montenegro said.

“It’s no longer restricted to just Bolivia,” Montenegro said in a separate interview on Thursday. “In other words, we’re willing to be partners outside Bolivia.”

However, Bolivia’s partner on Coipasa and Pastos Grandes will be required to turn the lithium into cathode material required for battery production before shipment, Montenegro said.

As with Uyuni, YLB will maintain majority control of the joint venture and require its partner to guarantee future sales of lithium, Montenegro said. Bolivia will not necessarily take a majority stake in any battery factory its partner builds abroad, he added.

Echazu and Montenegro declined to estimate how much lithium Coipasa and Pastos Grandes hold. But Echazu said the investment would likely be as large or larger than the project at Uyuni, which is estimated to contain at least 10-million tonnes of lithium.

Bolivia has hired two companies to certify lithium reserves at Uyuni and expects a figure to be announced late this year, Echazu said.

Tesla is pushing transportation into a clean, zero-emission, electric future more than any other company. Nonetheless, we also need leadership from large automakers that weren’t born electric. Globally, approximately 96 million passenger vehicles are sold a year. In the US alone, the figure is approximately 17 million. The most bullish forecasts have Tesla reaching a few million vehicles a year in several years. There’s no serious forecast of Tesla taking a huge chunk of the vehicle market in the next decade — not because it doesn’t produce the best cars in the world, but because it’s essentially impossible to ramp up to 10–20 million vehicles in a handful of years — and forecasts beyond a decade are really just games in wild guessing.

So, the question is, what are the e-mobility plans of the world’s 10 largest automakers* for the next 3–10 years? None of them see very high sales of any electric cars, but will they have compelling, competitive models on the market within a few years? Furthermore, will they actually have the production capacity to produce a large number of these cars if consumers want them?

We will have deeper dives into some of these companies in coming weeks and months, and we’ll also have a deep dive in the world of batteries, but for now, below are the world’s 3 largest automakers and some notes about their e-mobility ambitions (2016 sales in parentheses). In coming pieces, I’ll discuss automakers 4–10. (As a short note for Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance fans, these companies are treated as separate in the ranking linked above, so I’m treating them as separate here even though there’s an argument to be made they could be combined.)

1. Toyota
(10.2 million)

Toyota revealed at the end of 2017 that it would be marketing and selling over 10 all-electric vehicle models around the world by the early 2020s. It said it would be investing around or over ¥1.5 trillion ($13 billion) into the development of battery technology through 2030.

A more recent announcement in April of 2018 mentioned 10 electrified models by the end of 2020. “Electrified” can mean fully electric, plug-in hybrid (PHEV), or even conventional hybrid models, but Toyota appears to be referencing plug-in vehicles here.

At the moment, Toyota doesn’t sell any fully electric cars. The car with the biggest battery that it sells today, its only plug-in car, is the Prius Prime.

The next three plug-in vehicles Toyota has coming are Chinese PHEV versions of the Corolla and Levin in 2019, followed by a fully electric compact SUV based on its C-HR or IZOA in 2020.

Based on the conflicting statements, it’s unclear how many fully electric cars Toyota is bringing to market and how many plug-in hybrids in the next 3–5 years. It’s also unclear how many fully electric models will be sold outside of China — in North America, Europe, South America, Africa, or Australia. What is known is that Asia is a priority thanks to China’s strong EV policies. Toyota’s first all-electric cars will go to China first, and then Japan, India, the US, and Europe.

How much battery supply will Toyota have by 2020, 2025, and so on? We don’t know. Presumably, it won’t have enough supply to match demand for a long time, as that has been the trend for all automakers producing compelling or even sort of compelling electric cars.

It seems unlikely that Toyota will all of a sudden produce electric cars that are compelling enough to reach 1 million sales a year in the next few years, and even if it does, it doesn’t seem that it would have the battery supply to reach 1 million sales a year. Toyota, surprise us if you can!

2. Volkswagen Group
(10.1 million)

Volkswagen appears to be the most bullish about a transition to fully electric vehicles.

The German giant plans to be producing 50 fully electric models by 2025. To help achieve that, it intends to invest €35 billion ($40 billion) into electric car tech — largely batteries — by 2022.

It expects to be selling approximately 3 million electric cars a year by 2025, with those cars making up approximately 25% of the company’s sales.

With these goals in mind, It seems that Volkswagen is the company most likely to surpass Tesla in electric car sales by 2025. However, there’s a strong case to be made that Tesla will be selling more than 3 million cars a year by 2025. In other words, there’s a strong chance no automaker passes up Tesla.

One other positive point about Volkswagen on this topic is that it appears to be flying into fully electric cars, not wasting much time on plug-in hybrids. That’s another point that strongly makes the case Volkswagen sees electric cars as the future and wants to be a leader into that future within a few years.

The plug-in cars Volkswagen Group is currently selling include 6 plug-in hybrids and 2 fully electric cars sold in Europe in moderate volumes but elsewhere in tiny volumes. It has a long way to go to get up to a million electric cars a year, but we’ll see how that changes within a year or two.

3. Hyundai/Kia
(7.9 million)

The Hyundai/Kia combo, which is probably not the company you expected to be in the #3 spot, has yet another approach from the two companies above. It has taken the approach of offering hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and fully electric versions of new models. As it turns out, the fully electric versions have been much more popular than the company anticipated, but a shortage of batteries has led to many fewer sales than consumers would like. (It’s quite hard to get your hands on a fully electric Hyundai or Kia model all around the world.)

Like other companies, big long-term announcements were made at the end of 2017. Hyundai and Kia announced that they aim to bring 38 “green car” models to market in the next 8 years, with 7 of them planned for the next 5 years. (That means 31 of the 38 are planned for 6–8 years from now, which means that Hyundai/Kia is just leaving the starting line.)

How many of those models will be fully electric? One report, linked above, said it should be the majority of them. Another report, from earlier in 2017, expected it to be 8 of the 31 (which was the total target at that time). The report also stated that Hyundai/Kia planned to be second to only Toyota in green car sales by 2020 — but, again, we don’t have a clue what percentage of sales are expected to be plug-in cars, let alone fully electric cars.

We also don’t know how much money Hyundai/Kia is investing into EV development or batteries, and we don’t know what percentage or total number of sales it expects from its plug-in models in any coming year.

At the moment and in coming months, Hyundai/Kia plug-in vehicles include the Kia Soul EV, Kia Optima PHEV, Kia Niro EV, Kia Niro PHEV, Hyundai Kona EV, Hyundai Kona PHEV, Hyundai Ioniq EV, Hyundai Ioniq PHEV, and Hyundai Sonata PHEV.

ELECTRIC VEHICLE ‘NIGHTMARE’ IS HAUNTING BMW

Over half a century ago, the auto industry fought against seat belts. Then, in the 1970s, they fought against smog regulations because of expensive catalytic converters. They also opposed other safety standards like airbags. Today, legacy automakers cling to diesel and fight against reducing emissions. The latest target of their displeasure and dismay? Well, it’s obvious — they complain about a transition to electric vehicles.

A recent example comes to us courtesy of BMW. John Carey (via news.com.au) sat down with Klaus Frölich, the 58-year-old BMW board member in charge of development. According to the senior BMW exec, electric vehicles will always be more costly than gas-burners. “No, no, no,” was Frölich’s reply when asked if EVs will ever equal the prices of equivalent conventional cars. “Never.”

“It’s very simple,” says Frölich. In EVs with 90 to 100kWh battery packs, the cell cost alone will be $17,000 to $25,000. “You can produce whole cars, only with the cost of the battery,” he says. And Frölich doesn’t buy into the theory that when batteries are being produced in larger numbers, prices will fall. Instead, he deflects — noting certain materials in batteries which may become more expensive.

An example, he claims, is cobalt. “When everybody wants to have cobalt, the prices of cobalt will not go down, they will go up,” Frölich predicts. Nevertheless, he says BMW is working to secure low prices for cobalt out until 2030. “We are the only ones who are doing that,” Frölich claims. Hmmm.

Even though BMW plans to grow its portfolio of electrified vehicles, Frölich sounds anxious about leaving the gas-guzzling internal combustion engine behind. “So, it’s a nightmare that an electrified vehicle will cost the same as a combustion-engined car,” Frölich says. So, it’s no wonder BMW fans are backing away from the brand. And (more than) a few are coming around to Tesla.