Lithium News

Houston — Growing demand for storage and electric vehicle batteries is prompting companies to consider opening lithium mines in Nevada and elsewhere in the US that could increase lithium production in the US over the next several years by multiples of two to three, according to observers. Currently, there is just one lithium mine operating in the US, the Silver Peak facility in Nevada owned by Albemarle, which has a production capacity of 5,500 st/year.

A mine in Nevada that could come online by 2022 is being developed by Lithium Americas and could have annual production capacity of 10,000 st/year.

Meanwhile, Blue Eagle Lithium is analyzing data from a property near Tonopah, Nevada, the Railroad Valley project, that it has said shares geological similarities with Albemarle’s Silver Peak site. 46% of 2017 mine production went to batteries

According to the US Department of Interior’s US Geological Survey, lithium production from seven countries, not including the US, totaled 43,000 st in 2017, an increase of 13% over 2016 levels. According to the USGS’ commodity report, the increase in lithium production came “in response to increased demand for battery application.”

About 46% of the global-end use of lithium was for batteries, the rest for ceramics and glass, lubricating greases, polymer productions and other products, the USGS said. That report also said that US imports of lithium in 2017 were 3,430 st, with 49% coming from Chile and 48% from Argentina.

Albermarle says its Silver Peak mine production of lithium carbonate is shipped from its Nevada mine to Kings Mountain, North Carolina, where it is converted to lithium hydroxide. From there, the company says, it is sold to Asian companies, who use it to produce cathodes, which are used to manufacture batteries and battery packs.

Analysts note that even as Tesla and Panasonic are making batteries and battery packs at the Gigafactory in Storey County in Nevada, the lithium used for those batteries still has to go to Asia for cathode production.

Available conversion capacity is also an issue central to the worldwide lithium supply equation. China’s Tianqi Lithium is expected to have its 48,000 st/year Kwinana spodumene converter in Australia online by mid-2019, which is expected to ease capacity constraints.

A $93.1 billion battery market by 2025: report On Tuesday, San Francisco-based Grandview Research released a report saying the global lithium-ion battery market is projected to reach $93.1 billion by 2025, representing a 17% compounded annual growth rate.

“The rapid growth of the market is attributable to the increased usage of lithium-ion batteries in consumer electronics, grid storage systems and the rise of electric vehicles,” the report said.

“The push by automotive original equipment manufacturers and battery manufacturers to continually reduce battery pack costs continues,” the report quotes William Tokash, senior research analyst with Navigant Research, as saying. “This effort, led by improving battery manufacturing processes and maturing supply chains, is anticipated to yield a market driven by battery electric vehicles, where both large and small capacity Lithium-ion battery-pack-equipped vehicles have markedly improved driving ranges.”

The USGS report said the security of the US’ lithium supply “has become a top priority for technology companies in the US and Asia.”

It noted, for example, that brine mining operations were under development in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, China and the US, while spodumene mining operations were under development in Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Finland, Mali, Portugal, and Spain. ‘Money to be made’

In addition to the Nevada facilities that Lithium Americas and Blue Eagle are developing, a number of smaller development firms are also looking at projects.

Standard Lithium, a so-called junior lithium mining company based in Vancouver, Canada, has been working to develop a project in the Smackover Formation in Arkansas.

Robert Mintak, CEO of Standard, said last week in an interview that projects will come online “and there will likely be a glut” of lithium.

Mintak noted that roughly a decade ago the price of lithium was roughly $6,000/mt, but has climbed to the current price of $12,000/mt to $16,000/mt.

“Even if the price fell to $10,000/mt, there is still money to be made,” Mintak said. –Jeffrey Ryser, jeffrey.ryser@spglobal.com

The April 2018 inauguration of Hero Future Energies’ solar wind hybrid plant in Karnataka – the first such project in India.

The first ever wind and solar hybrid project in India, completed in April 2018, is to be retrofitted with energy storage after strong winds this year led to a curtailment of solar production.

Speaking to our sister site PV Tech at the REI Expo in Greater Noida, Rahul Munjal, chairman of Delhi-headquartered clean energy firm Hero Future Energies, said the plan is to use lithium-ion battery storage technology and the firm is currently in the process of procuring a technology supplier.

Munjal added: “The hybrid plant saw extremely good winds this year and when it saw good winds we had to back down solar because there was a constraint on the capacity we could put on the grid.

“Now to augment that, we feel the right thing to do is rather than waste the energy, store it.”

The second reason for adding a battery is that Hero wants to learn more about the technology by using it on its own plants and the battery will act as a pilot. If the trial goes well, then Hero will consider retrofitting some of its other renewable energy projects with storage in the future.

The hybrid plant is located in the state of Karnataka and PV Tech attended the inauguration in April this year, publishing a lengthy insight on the project. The plant at Kavithal, Raichur District, which included an existing 50MW wind farm, now has a neighbouring 28.8MW solar PV site to form a hybrid system. The project’s evacuation capacity remained at 50MW since the primary aim was to address grid-integration concerns around variable power coming from renewable energy. The off-takers of the power are a number of unnamed private companies also based in Karnataka.

Back in April, Munjal said he believes that large-scale coupling with energy storage will proliferate in the next two to three years, although price remains a problem for now.

Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) recently issued a Request for Selection (RfS) document for 2.5GW of hybrid wind and solar projects to be connected to the Interstate Transmission System (ISTS).

The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has also issued an amendment to its National Wind-Solar Hybrid Policy, clarifying that any form of energy storage – not just batteries – can be used in hybrid projects.

Italy’s Enel SpA (BIT:ENEL) announced on Tuesday it has started construction work on a 20-MW portion of its energy storage plant in Germany.

The Cremzow storage facility, which is Enel’s first in the country, already has 2 MW/3.2 MWh operational and the expansion will bring its total capacity to 22 MW/34.8 MWh.

Scheduled to be completed by the end of December 2018, the facility is a result of a EUR-17-million (USD 19.8m) agreement between Enel Green Power Germany (EGP Germany), local wind power company Enertrag AG and Swiss energy storage solutions company Leclanche SA (SWX:LECN).

EGP Germany holds 90% of the special purpose vehicle (SPV) that owns the asset, while Enertrag has the remaining 10%. Leclanche will act as the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor.

When complete, the Cremzow plant will provide frequency regulation services, help stabilise the German grid, facilitate the transition to renewable energy sources and be later integrated with Enertrag’s wind farms, Enel noted.

Long-duration energy storage — batteries or other technologies that can store energy for at least four hours of continuous operation, or possibly even longer — accounts for a minority of the grid-scale energy storage deployed today.

There are many reasons for this, including the cheapness and relative reliability of lithium-ion batteries for short-duration applications. As well as the, shall we say, less than stellar record of long-duration battery startups that have gone bankrupt or failed to deliver on their promises.

Over the past year and a half, we’ve seen Aquion run out of cash for its saltwater batteries, Alevo close down its mystery long-duration lithium-ion play, LightSail fold its compressed air storage business, and ViZn Energy lay off all but two staff as it seeks new funding for its flow battery.

But with the growth of intermittent wind and solar power on the grid, and states like Hawaii and California pushing ahead with aggressive 100 percent clean energy targets, long-duration energy storage will become a critical part of the future grid.

So believes ARPA-E, the Department of Energy’s blue-sky research program, which this week announced $28 million in R&D grants for 10 projects aimed at delivering energy storage systems that can last not just hours, but potentially days.

The projects being funded by ARPA-E’s DAYS program — a tortured acronym of sorts standing for “Duration Addition to electricitY Storage” — are targeting “durations of 10 to approximately 100 hours, opening significant new opportunities to increase grid resilience and performance,” according to this week’s announcement.

Importantly, all are working on systems “that are deployable in almost any location,” as opposed to massive pumped hydroelectric projects that make up 95 percent of the country’s total energy storage capacity today, and practically all of its long-duration storage.

But to compete effectively, each project will also be expected to “charge and discharge electricity at a target fixed cost per cycle.” While the target costs in question aren’t mentioned, ARPA-E’s funding opportunity announcement from May noted that “DAYS projects will explore a new design space in electricity storage that allows for strategic compromise of performance to achieve extremely low costs.”

Specifically, ARPA-E has separated its DAYS projects into two categories: systems that provide daily cycling in addition to longer-duration, less-frequent cycling; and systems that don’t perform daily cycling, but can take over when daily cycling resources are either filled or depleted. That allows it to fund projects that cover a wide array of technologies, from flow batteries that could be expected to serve for up to 10 hours per day, to thermal, chemical and underground pumped hydro storage systems that could, at least in theory, store energy in durations that last for more than four days at a time.

Flow batteries

Flow batteries — storage systems that use pumped electrolyte to increase storage capacity compared to lithium-ion and other enclosed batteries, but usually at the cost of lower round-trip efficiencies — fit into the category of daily long-duration cycling assets. The DAYS program is funding three different flow battery development efforts.

Hayward, Calif.-based Primus Power won a $3.5 million grant aimed at reducing the complexity and balance-of-systems costs of its zinc-bromine flow batteries. “Taking advantage of the way zinc and bromine behave in the cell, the battery will eliminate the need for a separator to keep the reactants apart when charged, as well as allow all the electrolyte to be stored in a single tank, instead of multiple cells.” Primus raised $32 million last year, bringing total equity investment to $94 million, plus another $20 million in government grants since the company was founded in 2009.

United Technologies Research Center won a $3 million grant to develop an energy storage system based on a new flow battery chemistry using inexpensive and readily available sulfur-manganese based active materials. A major manufacturer of fuel cells, it aims to “overcome challenges of system control and unwanted crossover between the two active materials through the flow membrane,” barriers that have prevented the technology’s low cost potential from being realized.

And Form Energy, a startup that’s exploring a wide variety of electrochemical storage systems, won a $3.95 million grant to develop energy storage that “takes advantage of the low cost and high abundance of sulfur in a water-based solution.” The Somerville, Mass.-based startup, featuring veterans of Tesla, A123 and out-of-business Aquion Energy, raised a $9 million Series A round in June, with a long-range goal of commercialization in about a decade.

Thermal, chemical and “geomechanical” energy storage

Most of the DAYS grant-winning projects are looking at even longer-duration energy storage than what flow batteries can provide, and they’re largely looking at heat and chemical reactions to get there.

DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, for instance, won a $2.79 million grant to “develop a high temperature, low cost thermal energy storage system using a high performance heat exchanger and closed loop Brayton cycle turbine to generate power.” The process will use electric heaters to warm “stable, inexpensive solid particles to temperatures greater than 1,100 °C during charging, and then feed them through a heat exchanger to heat a working fluid to drive a gas turbine.”

Other turbine-centric efforts include Hampton, N.H.-based Brayton Energy, which won $2 million to develop a molten salt thermal energy storage solution, using a “reversible turbine” design that allows each turbine to act as the compression stage for the other, and Akron, Ohio-based Echogen Power Systems, a previous ARPA-E grant winner, which got $3 million to develop a system that stores heat in low-cost materials such as sand or concrete, and pumps liquid carbon dioxide through it to a supercritical state that will expand and drive a turbine.

Antora Energy, a Fremont, Calif.-based startup, won a $3 million grant to explore an alternative approach to heat as a storage medium. It plans to heat carbon blocks to temperatures exceeding 2,000 °C, and then expose them to thermophotovoltaic panels, similar to traditional solar panels, but specifically designed to efficiently use the heat radiated by the blocks.

Two other grants went to university efforts exploring the use of heat to drive chemical reactions that store energy. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville won $1.5 million to develop an electrolyzer/fuel cell combination that produces hydrogen peroxide, and then uses the chemical to generate electricity. And Michigan State University won $2 million to explore a process that heats a bed of magnesium manganese oxide to release oxygen, and then passes air over the particle bed to start a chemical reaction that releases the heat to drive a gas turbine generator.

A $3.3 million grant went to San Francisco-based Quidnet Energy to explore the idea of “geomechanical” pumped hydro energy storage. The concept is to pump pressurized water into gaps in underground rocks, and then allow the induced strain in the surrounding rock to force the water back through a generator to produce electricity.

Consumers Energy has announced the operation of a new large-scale battery storage system on the campus of Western Michigan University.

The 1 MW battery’s output is about the amount of electricity used by approximately 1,000 residential electric customers in an hour, says Consumers Energy.

On Monday, Ed Montgomery, the university’s president, joined local legislators, county commissioners and Consumers Energy employees who worked on the project at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Western’s campus.

“Advances in battery storage technology have now reached the scale that they power entire communities on demand,” says Tim Sparks, Consumers Energy’s vice president of electric grid integration. “Our clean energy plan calls for more solar and wind electric generation facilities that will depend on battery storage to be dependable sources of energy for our customers for when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun shining. The Parkview Battery Project begins the next groundbreaking chapter in the story about how clean and reliable energy reaches Consumers Energy customers.”

The site was selected through a statewide search in consultation with Michigan State University (MSU). Over the next year, Consumers Energy and MSU consultants will study data generated at the new battery facility to better the potential for battery storage use around the state. Western Michigan University engineering students will also have opportunities to participate in partnerships with Consumers Energy.

VW unveiled its MEB electric platform this week and it is launching a new effort called ‘Electric for all’, which represents the brand’s goal to deploy millions of “attractive models at affordable prices on the road.”

The modular electric drive matrix (MEB) is VW’s next-generation electric platform on which the production versions of its “I.D.” concept electric vehicles are based on.

There’s the I.D., which is a Golf-sized vehicle is expected to be their first mass-market EV for the model year 2020. VW also unveiled the I.D. VIZZION sedan, the crossover all-electric I.D. CROZZ Concept, and then there’s the I.D. BUZZ electric microbus coming in 2022.

For the first time this week, VW is unveiling the rolling chassis without the bodywork and interior – “exactly as it will be used in series models.”

VW currently sells the e-Golf, but the vehicle is converted from its gas-powered platform, which results in a handful of compromises.

Christian Senger, Head of the E-mobility Product Line, says that the MEB, as a dedicated electric platform, will make it possible to install larger batteries:

“The ID. will be a milestone in technological development. It will be the first fully connected electric car with full everyday utility that millions of people will be able to afford. The car holds the road really well thanks to the flat battery in the floorpan and the space inside is much more generous – we are making substantial headway with the sense of spaciousness.”

VW is going with the skateboard-like design with the battery pack sitting on the floor between the two axles.

The automaker says that the platform will enable their vision of ‘Electric for all’ to bring more affordable EVs to market.

Brand Board Member for E-Mobility Thomas Ulbrich commented:

“We will make electric vehicles popular and get as many people as possible excited about electric cars. The MEB is one of the most important projects in the history of Volkswagen – a technological milestone, similar to the transition from the Beetle to the Golf.”