Lithium News

The initial public offering in Hong Kong this week of one of China’s biggest lithium producers will provide a test of both investor appetite for a metal that has been hailed as key to the future of electric cars and a stock market hurt by global trade tensions.

Ganfeng Lithium, which is based in China’s southeastern province of Jiangxi, could raise up to $676m when it prices its shares on Wednesday. They start trading the following week.

Although the company last week secured several cornerstone investors — those committed to holding the shares for a longer period — the listing comes at a delicate time for the lithium price and Hong Kong’s stock market, where the benchmark Hang Seng index is down just over 7 per cent this year.

The IPO is the first of several planned by producers of lithium. Investors have sought exposure to the metal in recent years because of its role as a key ingredient in manufacturing batteries used in electric vehicles.

Ganfeng Lithium’s reception on the public market will help shape the prospects for rival producers lined up to float, analysts said. There has been a nervousness about lithium oversupply for the last 12 months Simon Moores, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence managing director.

It is set to be followed in Hong Kong by Chinese competitor Tianqi Lithium and in New York by Livent, the lithium business being spun off by US chemicals company FMC in October.

The three companies are coming to the public market as euphoria over lithium’s position in a future in which the electric car is dominant has given way to concern over an oversupply of the metal. A silver white metal that is not traded on any exchange, lithium is on track for its first annual drop in three years. Prices have fallen 17 per cent this year, according to a global average assessed by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

“There has been a nervousness about lithium oversupply for the last 12 months,” says Simon Moores, managing director of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

The weakness in lithium prices has been triggered chiefly by rising supply in China, which is developing its own lithium deposits in the far western province of Qinghai, some of which are owned by Warren Buffett-backed electric car maker BYD.

Ganfeng Lithium, which has agreements to supply lithium to BMW and Tesla, late last month secured the backing of six investors including Korean battery makers LG Chem and Samsung SDI.

While the immediate outlook for the lithium price is volatile, strategists say that the longer-term outlook looks brighter given all the world’s major carmakers are switching to electric cars whose batteries rely on lithium. The number of large battery “gigafactories” — named for the tens of gigawatt hours of batteries they produce — being built round the world has risen to 50 from 3 in 2015, according to Mr Moores.

What is a lithium metal oxide battery?

A lithium metal oxide (LMO) battery is a specialized form of primary (non-rechargeable) cell developed for use in certain medical, military and industrial applications that require a self-contained power source that is small and lightweight, yet capable of delivering high pulses and high rates of continuous power even after prolonged storage.

Available in both high power and medium power varieties, LMO batteries are constructed with a carbon-based anode, a multi-metal oxide cathode and an organic electrolyte, delivering up to 20-year operating life with an annual self-discharge rate of less than 1% per year. These small but powerful cells feature a nominal voltage of 4 V and up to 2 Wh of energy, with a discharge capacity of 135 mAh to 500 mAh, capable of handling 5 A continuous loads and 15 A maximum pulses. They also feature a wide temperature range (–55 °C to 85 °C) and a hermetic seal for added safety.

LMO batteries are UL-recognized for safety, with solvents that are non-toxic and non-pressurized and anode materials that are less reactive than standard lithium cells. These batteries have performed well in safety tests for nail penetration, crush, high temperature, short circuit, and overcharge.

How does it work?

The unique performance characteristics of an LMO battery is ideally suited for medical applicationsthat require continuous high-rate power, instant activation and exceptionally long shelf life. These applications include:

• Automatic external defibrillators
• Surgical power tools
• Infusion pumps
• Bone growth stimulators
• Handheld medical devices

For example, surgical device manufacturer BioAccess chose high energy LMO batteries as an optional upgrade versus an alkaline battery pack to enable their surgical drill to become smaller, lighter and more ergonomic.

By substituting 6 AA-size TLM-1550HP LMO batteries for the alkaline battery pack, the BioAccess surgical drill achieved a 60% reduction in weight and volume while at the same time improving overall power and performance. An equivalent alkaline battery pack would have required three times the weight and 2.5 times the volume (15 AA-size alkaline batteries vs. 6 AA-size TLM-1550-HP batteries).

The TLM-1550HP batteries delivered an open circuit voltage (OCV) of 4.1 V along with high pulses of up to 15 A with 5 A maximum continuous load. Use of these powerful little batteries also enabled the BioAccess surgical drill to achieve faster drilling speeds, more active drill time (30 to 40 seconds at a time for up to 20 to 30 cycles), more instantaneous power and greater stall torque, thus resulting in more efficient drilling cycles with less operator fatigue.

The high pulse and high rate discharge characteristics and prolonged storage life of an LMO cell are also ideal for powering automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) that can stand idle for years but must perform reliably in life-saving situations.

Livent Corp. has given a price range for its shares in its coming initial public offering, a stock sale that will test investor appetite for companies that produce lithium—an important commodity used in batteries that power electric vehicles.

The company said in an updated prospectus it filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it will sell 20 million shares of common stock at between $18 and $20 a share on the New York Stock Exchange. Including an additional three million shares IPO underwriters may sell, Livent could raise as much as $460 million.

Tesla is currently trying to secure resources for its battery production ramp up at Gigafactory 1.

Now we’ve learned that the automaker has signed a supply agreement with China’s biggest lithium producer.

China’s Ganfeng Lithium, who recently signed a massive supply agreement with LG Chem, announced today a new deal to supply lithium-hydroxide to Tesla starting this year up to 2020 with the option to extend the contract by 3 years, according to Bloomberg.

The timing of the contract indicates that Tesla and its battery producer Panasonic would use the lithium at its Gigafactory 1 in Nevada and not its upcoming new Gigafactory 3 in China.

If Gigafactory 1 reaches its goal of 35 GWh of battery cell production by the end of the year, it is estimated to need about 28,000 tons of lithium hydroxide per year.

The new deal with Ganfeng would reportedly cover about a fifth of Tesla’s lithium needs.

Tesla has been increasingly involved in the battery supply chain since it started its Gigafactory project with Panasonic and it has been trying to secure raw materials from many different sources.

At first, they said that they would focus on sourcing resources locally in America, but recent contracts, including this one, have been signed with foreign companies.

Earlier this year, Tesla secured a deal to get lithium from Australia.

Though Ganfeng also has an interest in Lithium Americas, which has several ongoing projects in America, including in the US and in Chile.

The automaker already signed a conditional supply agreement with Pure Energy Minerals, which has claims on 9,500 acres of lithium brine in Clayton Valley – just a four-hour drive from the Tesla Gigafactory, but the mining company has yet to enter a production phase and therefore, Tesla needs to secure other sources.

Electrek’s Take

We have been expecting to see more similar supply agreements from Tesla for a while now.

While it would be preferable to see Tesla secures supply closer to Gigafactory 1, it needs to get lithium where it can as the market becomes increasingly more competitive.

Battery supply is in many cases the bottleneck in electric vehicle production and that’s expected to become even more the case with new EVs from legacy automakers going into production.

Deals like this one are going to be increasingly important.

Near the crest of the Andes mountain range in Bolivia lies the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world.

The stunning location is a growing international tourist destination and was recently used as the setting for an epic battle scene in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”

What can at times look like a snow-covered wonderland is actually several dried-up, prehistoric lakes that formed salty pentagon patterns on the surface. But beneath the crust is lithium, the precious metal element, that could potentially provide a better economic future for Bolivia.

Barcroft Media via Getty Images, FILE

“Nightline” traveled to the Salar de Uyuni to get a closer look at the 4,500 square miles of the world’s largest deposit of lithium, which powers batteries, electric cars and phones. For perspective, the Salar is nearly 100 times larger than Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flat.

As one of the poorest countries in South America, Bolivia hopes the global need for the element will revolutionize its economy and it’ll become “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

The Salar’s barren landscape is a robust worksite where families have mined salt for generations.

Aizar Raldes/AFP/Getty Images, FILE

Two brothers, Moises and Erick Chambi, are known as “saleros” or salt pickers. Their work is physically demanding. They chop, saw and stack salt blocks directly from the earth’s crust for sale across Bolivia.

“(The Salar is) not 10 or 20 years (old),” Moises Chambi said while pointing to lines in the salt blocks. “This is the accumulation of thousands of years.”

He explained that the brown lines between the layers of salt were indicative of periods of flooding in the Salar and, similar to rings of a tree trunk, each spaced out area could span hundreds of years.

Running his fingers along lines in the ground, he shared that “the Salar is like a human being that breathes through these cracks,” Moises Chambi said. “It’s also like a living plant. That’s why we also have to respect it and take care of it. For us it is sacred.”

Consumers across Bolivia once sought out the Chambi brothers’ business, but these days the product mostly goes to making salt licks for cattle and bricks for construction.

The Salar’s popularity with tourists has been a boon for local hotels, especially ones made of the Salar’s most popular ingredient. The exquisite five-star Luna Salada and Palacio de Sal hotels have walls, floors and furniture made entirely of salt detail and salt blocks, similar to those sold by the Chambi brothers.

They sell each of their salt bricks for about 50 cents and while it won’t make them wealthy, it is enough to support their young families.

An hour’s drive from the Chambi brother’s work site sits a bustling lithium carbonate processing plant, run by the Bolivian government.

Victor Oquendo/ABC News

The plant exports the natural resource for roughly $25,000 per ton to a number of countries, including the U.S., Russia and Japan.

Marco Antonio Condoretty, head of implementation and engineering, oversees each step of the production process and gave us a tour of his site.

Wells tap nearly 100 feet deep to source the Salar’s lithium-rich brine, running it through a system of pipes that span miles into one of the plant’s many pools.

The brine sits in those pools for approximately six months where the sun and constant wind help separate lithium from the salt and other impurities through evaporation.

In one of the final stages the lithium gets processed and separated from another by-product: potassium, which the plant also sells.

Victor Oquendo/ABC News

This factory is projected to process 200 tons of lithium in 2018. That number will explode by nearly 750 percent to 15,000 tons when a neighboring government plant wraps construction next year.

Despite some concerns that lithium processing could take over the Salar, Condoretty assured that this vast location will remain largely unaffected. “The lithium we take out now is very little. Therefore if we are going to expand, we are not going to affect the Salar.”

In fact, only up to 4 percent of the Salar has been set aside by the government for mining and processing, he said.

Due to the plant’s remote location, it is also home to its employees who live on site for two weeks at a time, followed by a seven day break. To keep plant employees busy and healthy, the location offers a hangout area and workspace, including a gym, pool tables, even a clinic.

Victor Oquendo/ABC News

As for the living arrangements, Condoretty said employees share their living quarters, sleeping in shared rooms like dormitories that sleep up to three people per room.

The entire plant is proudly run and operated by Bolivians only, with, until very recently, foreigners completely shut out of development and production. That’s because Bolivia is holding fiercely on to its natural resources, limiting foreign involvement following centuries of foreign exploitation of its silver, gas and oil.

Condoretty acknowledges this may have hampered their production and ultimately, their sales, but claims “we are doing it ourselves. This means generating income only for Bolivians. Our achievement is that it took us longer, but we [are the ones who] did it.”

When asked whether the local salt pickers might have a future at the expanding plant, Condoretty replied, “the salt pickers can create a future here, and in reality, all the people of Bolivia have a future here to work, because this plant belongs to them.”

Despite its previous heavy emphasis on limiting foreign involvement, the plant recently announced a $1.3 billion dollar deal with a German company, ACI Systems, to expand local production. With a 51 percent majority stake, the new deal adds promise to Bolivia’s gamble that lithium could one day lift its economy.

And as the global demand for lithium-powered lives seemingly increases daily, the future in the Salar de Uyuni seems brighter than ever.

New lithium-based battery could make use of greenhouse gas before it ever gets into the atmosphere.

A new type of battery developed by researchers at MIT could be made partly from carbon dioxide captured from power plants. Rather than attempting to convert carbon dioxide to specialized chemicals using metal catalysts, which is currently highly challenging, this battery could continuously convert carbon dioxide into a solid mineral carbonate as it discharges.

While still based on early-stage research and far from commercial deployment, the new battery formulation could open up new avenues for tailoring electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion reactions, which may ultimately help reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

The battery is made from lithium metal, carbon, and an electrolyte that the researchers designed. The findings are described today in the journal Joule, in a paper by assistant professor of mechanical engineering Betar Gallant, doctoral student Aliza Khurram, and postdoc Mingfu He.

Currently, power plants equipped with carbon capture systems generally use up to 30 percent of the electricity they generate just to power the capture, release, and storage of carbon dioxide. Anything that can reduce the cost of that capture process, or that can result in an end product that has value, could significantly change the economics of such systems, the researchers say.

However, “carbon dioxide is not very reactive,” Gallant explains, so “trying to find new reaction pathways is important.” Generally, the only way to get carbon dioxide to exhibit significant activity under electrochemical conditions is with large energy inputs in the form of high voltages, which can be an expensive and inefficient process. Ideally, the gas would undergo reactions that produce something worthwhile, such as a useful chemical or a fuel. However, efforts at electrochemical conversion, usually conducted in water, remain hindered by high energy inputs and poor selectivity of the chemicals produced.

Gallant and her co-workers, whose expertise has to do with nonaqueous (not water-based) electrochemical reactions such as those that underlie lithium-based batteries, looked into whether carbon-dioxide-capture chemistry could be put to use to make carbon-dioxide-loaded electrolytes — one of the three essential parts of a battery — where the captured gas could then be used during the discharge of the battery to provide a power output.

This approach is different from releasing the carbon dioxide back to the gas phase for long-term storage, as is now used in carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. That field generally looks at ways of capturing carbon dioxide from a power plant through a chemical absorption process and then either storing it in underground formations or chemically altering it into a fuel or a chemical feedstock.

Instead, this team developed a new approach that could potentially be used right in the power plant waste stream to make material for one of the main components of a battery.

While interest has grown recently in the development of lithium-carbon-dioxide batteries, which use the gas as a reactant during discharge, the low reactivity of carbon dioxide has typically required the use of metal catalysts. Not only are these expensive, but their function remains poorly understood, and reactions are difficult to control.

By incorporating the gas in a liquid state, however, Gallant and her co-workers found a way to achieve electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion using only a carbon electrode. The key is to preactivate the carbon dioxide by incorporating it into an amine solution.

“What we’ve shown for the first time is that this technique activates the carbon dioxide for more facile electrochemistry,” Gallant says. “These two chemistries — aqueous amines and nonaqueous battery electrolytes — are not normally used together, but we found that their combination imparts new and interesting behaviors that can increase the discharge voltage and allow for sustained conversion of carbon dioxide.”

They showed through a series of experiments that this approach does work, and can produce a lithium-carbon dioxide battery with voltage and capacity that are competitive with that of state-of-the-art lithium-gas batteries. Moreover, the amine acts as a molecular promoter that is not consumed in the reaction.

The key was developing the right electrolyte system, Khurram explains. In this initial proof-of-concept study, they decided to use a nonaqueous electrolyte because it would limit the available reaction pathways and therefore make it easier to characterize the reaction and determine its viability. The amine material they chose is currently used for CCS applications, but had not previously been applied to batteries.

This early system has not yet been optimized and will require further development, the researchers say. For one thing, the cycle life of the battery is limited to 10 charge-discharge cycles, so more research is needed to improve rechargeability and prevent degradation of the cell components. “Lithium-carbon dioxide batteries are years away” as a viable product, Gallant says, as this research covers just one of several needed advances to make them practical.

But the concept offers great potential, according to Gallant. Carbon capture is widely considered essential to meeting worldwide goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but there are not yet proven, long-term ways of disposing of or using all the resulting carbon dioxide. Underground geological disposal is still the leading contender, but this approach remains somewhat unproven and may be limited in how much it can accommodate. It also requires extra energy for drilling and pumping.

The researchers are also investigating the possibility of developing a continuous-operation version of the process, which would use a steady stream of carbon dioxide under pressure with the amine material, rather than a preloaded supply the material, thus allowing it to deliver a steady power output as long as the battery is supplied with carbon dioxide. Ultimately, they hope to make this into an integrated system that will carry out both the capture of carbon dioxide from a power plant’s emissions stream, and its conversion into an electrochemical material that could then be used in batteries. “It’s one way to sequester it as a useful product,” Gallant says.

“It was interesting that Gallant and co-workers cleverly combined the prior knowledge from two different areas, metal-gas battery electrochemistry and carbon-dioxide capture chemistry, and succeeded in increasing both the energy density of the battery and the efficiency of the carbon-dioxide capture,” says Kisuk Kang, a professor at Seoul National University in South Korea, who was not associated with this research.

“Even though more precise understanding of the product formation from carbon dioxide may be needed in the future, this kind of interdisciplinary approach is very exciting and often offers unexpected results, as the authors elegantly demonstrated here,” Kang adds.

MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering provided support for the project.