Lithium News

With pressure escalating during one of the worst weeks in its almost 15-year-history, Tesla Inc. raced to manufacture and deliver as many Model 3 sedans as it could to report to rattled investors. The carmaker still probably came up short.

Tesla’s Fremont, California, delivery hub was packed with people Saturday evening as the last hours of the quarter drew to a close. Red couches and tall white tables were set up outside, a DJ played music and a truck selling Vietnamese food was on hand. Behind the scenes, a company that’s struggled to figure out how to mass manufacture cars had implored workers to get production on track and disprove their doubters.

But the skeptics are getting louder after the last few days. The electric-car maker led by Elon Musk has come under regulatory scrutiny for the second crash this year involving Tesla’s driver-assistance system Autopilot, the latest of which resulted in a fatality. Moody’s Investors Service last week downgraded the company’s credit rating further into junk, saying production problems and mounting obligations could necessitate a more than $2 billion capital raise soon to avoid running out of cash. Tesla shares dropped as much as 5.1 percent in early trading on Monday.

“It’s about the magnitude of the miss,” Philippe Houchois, a Jefferies Group LLC who rates the shares a hold, wrote in a report to clients Monday. Tesla probably fell short of a company-supplied consensus estimate of 10,000 Model 3 deliveries in the first quarter and may have trailed its target to end March making the sedan at 2,500-unit weekly rate, he said.

Musk, 46, risked coming off as tone deaf to investor concerns by sending a series of April Fools’ Day tweets to joke that Tesla had gone bankrupt. The chief executive officer first unveiled the Model 3 on March 31, 2016, and Tesla’s manufacturing woes have kept hundreds of thousands of consumers who placed $1,000 deposits for the sedan waiting.

Tesla’s stock dropped 4.5 percent to $254.17 as of 9:36 a.m. in New York. The shares fell 22 percent in March, the steepest monthly drop since December 2010, the year the company went public.

‘Dream Car’

Social media posts by customers who took delivery of their Model 3 over the holiday weekend suggest Tesla still maintains an army of true believers willing to stay put in line for their car.

“Two years ago to the day, I put down a deposit on a car I’d never even seen before,” Amanda Bell, a software developer in Nashville, wrote Saturday on Twitter. “Today, I picked up my dream car.”

Bell, 26, said by phone Sunday that she likes that Tesla’s cars have the ability to roll out new features via software updates.

Since starting Model 3 deliveries in July of last year, Tesla has pushed back production goals for the car several times, citing issues with battery output and automating its assembly lines. The company forecast back in January that it would likely end the first quarter making about 2,500 units of the car a week.

Sign of Confidence?

Tesla reports production and deliveries results within a few days of each quarter ending. Musk tweeted to tease “important news in a few hours” on Sunday afternoon, then sent the tongue-in-cheek posts about Tesla going bankrupt.

“While the April Fool’s tweet, to us, was poorly timed and likely frustrating to TSLA’s IR team, there is likely nothing to see here,” James Albertine, an analyst at Consumer Edge Research who recommends buying the shares, wrote in a report Monday.

Bloomberg is tracking the Model 3 rollout with an experimental tool that estimates production using vehicle identification numbers. The tracker estimates that Tesla is building about 1,190 Model 3s a week as of Sunday, though that figure may not capture any last-minute burst in output. Tesla may have produced almost 9,300 of the sedans in the quarter, according to the tracker.

Barclays Plc analyst Brian Johnson has warned clients to watch out for a potential “burst rate bear trap,” in which Tesla beats Wall Street’s lowered projections for Model 3 deliveries. He estimated Tesla was producing 1,500 to 1,700 units of the Model 3 each week.

“We think it’s possible Tesla may have stockpiled batteries amid Fremont downtime, allowing production to be higher in the final week,” Johnson wrote in a report Thursday. “Any such ‘beat’ is unlikely to be sustainable, and questions remain on Tesla’s ability to sustainably reach” its goals.

Tesla faces a pileup of other challenges, including scrutiny of Autopilot. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating a fatal Model X crash that occurred March 23 in Mountain View involving a driver who had engaged the driver-assistance system.

Unhappy Regulator

Tesla published a blog post late Friday that said the driver didn’t have his hands on the steering wheel for six seconds before colliding with a highway divider, despite receiving several visual and one audible warnings earlier.

The NTSB is “unhappy” that Tesla is disclosing information during an active crash investigation, spokesman Chris O’Neil said Sunday. The agency will look into all aspects of the incident, including the driver previously raising concerns about the Autopilot system, he said.

“This is another potential illustration of the mushy middle of automation,” Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies self-driving cars, said in an email. Partial automation systems such as Tesla’s Autopilot “work unless and until they don’t,” and there will be speculation and research about how safe they are, he said.

Nightmare Week

Tesla’s nightmare week also included a Moody’s downgrade of the company’s corporate family rating to B3, six levels into junk, which sent its unsecured bonds to all-time lows. Late Thursday, the carmaker recalled all 123,000 Model S cars built before April 2016 to retrofit a power-steering component.

Tesla’s release of Model 3 deliveries results may “diffuse some of the near-term ‘headwinds from the headlines,”’ wrote Albertine, the Consumer Edge Research analyst. Investors may be looking for the company to report that it made about 1,750 Model 3 sedans a week, which many would view as positive progress despite being below the company’s guidance, he said.

“While it seems a perfect storm is weighing on shares, we are buyers into pressure as Model 3 production ramps,” Ben Kallo, an analyst at Robert W. Baird, wrote in a report Monday.

South Korea’s leading steelmaker Posco has begun operating the country’s first manufacturing line dedicated to lithium hydroxide inside its steel mill in Gwangyang, South Jeolla Province, upon completion this month, the company said on Monday.

Along with lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide is a key material of lithium battery used in the production of high-performance electric car batteries.

The new manufacturing line, which was added inside Posco’s lithium extraction plant, has annual capacity of 1,500 tons. Lithium hydroxide is produced by enriching lithium phosphate collected from used lithium-ion batteries.

The traditional steel mill bets battery materials will become its new revenue source.

Shares of Posco gained 0.6 percent to close Monday at 327,500 won.

An unnamed official from Posco said that lithium hydroxide produced from its new manufacturing line is very economical with recovery rate above 80 percent and also environmental as it does not produce any solid waste in the manufacturing process. It also contains only one third of impurities as to lithium hydroxide produced by other companies.

Posco plans to sell lithium hydroxide to domestic and foreign battery makers including LG Chem Ltd. and Samsung SDI Co. after certification procedure is completed.

Posco, meanwhile, has been producing lithium carbonate used in laptop and mobile phone batteries at its lithium extraction plant since February, last year. The latest addition has led Posco to up its annual production capacity to 2,500 tons that include 1,000 tons of lithium carbonate and 1,500 tons of lithium hydroxide. Posco also plans to add an additional line this year for lithium carbonate and hydroxide production using lithium ore.

Kwon Oh-joon, chairman of Posco, said that the company will continue to put out efforts to localize key materials that have been dependent on imports. Korean companies currently depend wholly on imports for supply of lithium hydroxide.

According to Posco, global demand for lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide is projected to increase from 250,000 tons in 2017 to 710,000 tons in 2025. Demand for lithium hydroxide, in particular, will increase significantly amid a rise in electric vehicle sales, the company

Quantum batteries should have faster charging time due to the quantum entanglement among the units. The units are all coupled to a common quantized electromagnetic mode, and photons from the energy source mediate a long-range interaction between units, generating entanglement among them.

The enhancement increases as the number of units increases (specifically, when a quantum battery consists of N units, the quantum advantage scales as the square root of N).

They will be investigating the tradeoff between the quantum battery’s charging power and its energy storage capacity.

Quantum information theorems state that it is possible to exploit collective quantum resources to greatly enhance the charging power of quantum batteries (QBs) made of many identical elementary units. Researchers present and solve a model of a QB that can be engineered in solid-state architectures. It consists of two-level systems coupled to a single photonic mode in a cavity. They contrast this collective model (“Dicke QB”), whereby entanglement is genuinely created by the common photonic mode, to the one in which each two-level system is coupled to its own separate cavity mode (“Rabi QB”). By employing exact diagonalization, they demonstrate the emergence of a quantum advantage in the charging power of Dicke QBs.

A parking lot in suburban New Jersey isn’t the first place I’d look for a revolution.

According to Jaguar, it’s where ours will start.

After less than four minutes behind the wheel of the 2019 Jaguar I-Pace, the electric Jaguar feels like the beginning of something.

As the first luxury battery electric vehicle from a mainstream automaker, the I-Pace will be followed by many more from other automakers—dozens if the timeline stretches far enough into the future.

Its all-electric powertrain is hardly revolutionary. The 90-kilowatt-hour liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery tucked under the cabin floor of the I-Pace, and its twin 147-kilowatt motors at the front and rear axles, hardly register as a surprise anymore.

That extended timeline will eventually expand to include the more classic Jaguars in the automaker’s renovated headquarters in Mahwah, New Jersey. The past is equally important as the future in the I-Pace.

Planted next to sexy E-Types and sturdy, boxy Land Rovers, the I-Pace’s “spaceship” design is more than a departure. Revolution? Maybe.

Fast, furiously

I get one shot at driving an I-Pace, on an improvised autocross course at Jaguar’s new U.S. headquarters.

Gray skies, gray asphalt, and a gray I-Pace lacked flavor, so the electric Jag had to provide color for the day.

The 432 nickel-manganese-cobalt cells that power the I-Pace also add prodigious weight to the tall wagon’s frame. Despite a length just fractions of an inch greater than a compact XE sedan, the Jaguar I-Pace interior feels as large as a full-size XJ sedan—and its 4,800-pound curb weight feels closer to a Range Rover.

Unlike any car or SUV from the automaker, the I-Pace replaces Jaguar’s rotary drive selector with three silver buttons—for reverse, neutral, and drive—and a black button for park.

They flank a lower touchscreen for climate controls, which sounds more complicated than it is. It’s modern, but hardly “Star Trek” stuff.

Jaguar took a similar simple tack for the EV drive. The I-Pace can be programmed to creep at idle when the driver releases the brake (functionally irrelevant for most EV owners) or sit still.

It can also toggle between drive modes: one is a two-pedal, comparatively Victorian drive, the other offering aggressive regen (up to 0.4 G) for effective one-pedal operation.

There is no sport or “Ludicrous” mode, and virtually no ability to vary how the twin motors deliver power. Call it “EV for Beginners,” which should cover most I-Pace buyers slow to adopt electric powertrains.

Speed, but weight

But the electric Jag moved fast. Its 512 pound-feet of torque is near-instant and convincing after a stab at the accelerator. Power is split equally between front and rear motors, delivering an urgent but not abrupt takeoff into our parking-lot gymkhana.

Steering the heavy I-Pace is hardly a chore: The wheel is light and vaguely connected to the road. The car’s weight may be its greatest liability—it pitches and rolls, just as physics tells it to—but four-wheel independent suspension assisted by standard air suspension is one of its best assets.

Around the course, with increasing speed, the I-Pace compensated well for its weight. It feels and rides tall like a Subaru Outback, but manages some of its body motions better.

The I-Pace darted quickly through the cones with a whiff of fun from the rear end.

The all-wheel-drive system reacts quickly and without much warning—compared to Jag’s standard, internal combustion all-wheel-drive system from Magna—though it still defaults to understeer when drivers get too ambitious with its 2.5 tons.

Our autocross was scored not only on time, but also efficiency and distance traveled. After my brief stint behind the wheel, I learned that while my time was mid-pack, my distance traveled was lower than those of earlier drivers, aided by the Jag’s easy control around the cones.

More time would have revealed more about the I-Pace’s driving dynamics. I think they’re very good. Weight and a tall ride height are the I-Pace’s biggest enemies, aided by big wheels without much sidewall give.

The car delivered a ride that never crashed over bumps or felt flinty through the 255-section Pirelli P Zero tires—but total distance covered was only slightly more than most people travel to their mailbox.

More time, and more miles, will reveal more.

Inside game

The I-Pace displays operating information on a large, 12.3-inch driver display serving as the instrument cluster that shows state of charge, estimated range, and speed.

A 10-inch touchscreen for infotainment is horizontally oriented—no vertical tablets in the I-Pace, a nod to convention for its mostly new EV buyers. A smaller touchscreen with variable-function knobs for climate control, some vehicle features, and redundant infotainment controls sits below.

From behind the wheel, the I-Pace carefully keeps away from anything too abstract. Aside from a few indicators and minus the murmur of an idling engine, the I-Pace is all but indistinguishable from the rest of the Jaguar lineup.

Designer Wayne Burgess said initial interior design concepts drew wild shapes for the cabin, but they were tempered by crash regulations and the requirements of accommodating the wide varieties of human form and associated appendages.

When it goes on sale later this year, Jaguar expects the I-Pace to appeal equally to EV adopters and luxury buyers who will be drawn to the spacious, but conventional, interior.

In that way, the 2019 Jaguar I-Pace is hardly a visible revolution.

But for luxury shoppers who’ve been on the sidelines, waiting for a mainstream luxury manufacturer to make a long-range battery-electric vehicle, the I-Pace will be a revelation.

That’s probably the point.

Lithium-ion batteries based on intercalation compound electrodes exhibit poor performance at temperatures below 0°C. Insufficient ionic conductivity and freezing of the electrolyte are generally seen as the main reasons for the poor performance of rechargeable batteries at low temperatures. Although several attempts have been made to solve this problem, those attempts involved additional materials that added extra weight, which is detrimental for portable devices.

Now a team from Fudan University (Shanghai, China; www.fudan.edu.cn) has developed an ethyl acetate-based electrolyte that exhibits sufficient ionic conductivity at –70°C. Ethyl acetate was a promising choice due to its low freezing point of –84°C, but the low-temperature performance of ethyl acetate electrolyte had never been investigated previously.

For the electrodes, the team used two organic polymers: a polytriphenylamine (PTPAn) cathode; and a 1,4,5,8-naphthalenetetracarboxylic dianhydride (NTCDA)-derived polymide (PNTCDA) anode. Unlike the electrodes used in Li-ion batteries, these organic compounds do not rely on intercalation — the process of integrating ions into the electrodes’ molecular matrix.

The team noted that their battery offers several other advantages. “Compared to the transition-metal-containing electrode materials in conventional Li-ion batteries, organic materials are abundant, inexpensive and environmentally friendly,” says team member Yongyao Xia. He estimates the price of the team’s electrode materials at about one third that of the electrodes in a commercial Li-ion battery.

More work will be required before the new battery can be commercialized, however. The specific energy (energy per unit mass) of the new battery is still low compared with commercial Li-ion batteries, and the assembly process needs to be further improved.

One side effect of the increasing demand for lithium is a rush-to-market tendency from mining companies. “Over the next several years, a number of companies are coming online to extract lithium carbonate from spodumene ore, which is typically about 8% Li 2O by weight. In order to meet demand, it’s been a rush to start up,” says Josh Marion, a project engineer from Jenike & Johanson Inc. This rush, combined with the high value of lithium and its specific physical properties, underlines the importance of proper design throughout all stages of lithium processing — from initial mining all the way to the final refining steps. This forces processors to approach bulk solids handling in a new way when trying to achieve the desired benchmarks for product purity, particle size, and density. “A lot of the processing demands can be likened more to pharmaceutical manufacturing than traditional mineral processing. There’s a premium on the quality of material that goes to battery manufacturers, and without reliable solids handling, you cannot achieve the product uniformity that is required,” explains Marion.

Some of the main operational issues experienced by lithium processors include caking, buildup and flow stoppage. To extract lithium from spodumene ore after mining, the raw ore goes through a series of crushing and size-classification steps to generate ore of the required particle size. The fine ore is then sent to a concentrator plant where it goes through several drying, milling, separation, dewatering and further size-classification steps to generate spodumene concentrate. The concentrate then proceeds to a processing plant, where it is calcined, and various aqueous solutions, acids and other chemicals are added to extract different impurities, such as iron, aluminum, silicon and magnesium. Finally, the wet cake is recrystallized and dried into the lithium hydroxide (LiOH) or lithium carbonate (Li 2CO3) product. “Particularly during those steps where the lithium is in a wet cake, if you don’t have an adequate dryer or the handling equipment is not properly designed to handle slightly wet material, you often experience buildup of lithium and lithium cake throughout the plant. Also, due to the hygroscopic nature of lithium salts, even when the material is dry, it may tend to absorb moisture and cake,” says Marion. He emphasizes that attention to detail during the equipment design phase is crucial in avoiding these bottlenecks and ensuring consistent product quality. “When selecting and designing equipment, it is critical to ensure that the characteristics of the material at each stage of the process be considered,” he adds.

As the performance demands of LIBs have evolved, equipment manufacturers are developing new technologies to meet those needs. “The key parameters for lithium producers right now are purity and particle size,” says Ananta Islam, sales director for the North American chemicals division of GEA Group AG (Düsseldorf, Germany; www.gea.com). The presence of certain impurities directly impacts battery performance, so lithium producers must align with a strict set of purity specifications. “Users are looking for a very low concentration of sodium, potassium, sulfur and heavy metals inside a battery-grade product,” explains Christian Melches, senior sales and technology manager at GEA. Whether starting with brine materials, as is common in South America, or spodumene ore, the typical lithium source in Canada and Australia, these impurities are usually present in considerable amounts. To address purity concerns, GEA provides crystallization units (Figure 1) that can be combined to optimize purification, says Melches. “The edge comes from knowing how to guide the flows through the process itself to several crystallizers to get the purest product,” he states. Another important consideration in combined crystallization units is energy efficiency. One energy-saving measure is the use of mechanical recompression of vapors from the crystallizer to create steam for driving the process.

LiOH — currently the preferred lithium form for most LIB makers — demands an extremely precise particle-size distribution, which requires specialized spray-drying equipment. A typical particle-size range for conventional spray drying might be 40–50 μm, but for LiOH processing, the range is around 5–7 μm, explains Islam. To ensure that materials meet requirements, GEA developed and patented a specific nozzle for lithium handling (Figure 2). “The Combi-Nozzle utilizes a high-pressure nozzle and compressed air for secondary atomization to further reduce the particle size,” says Islam. Lithium producers say that a smaller particle size is needed for properly compacting powders, which directly affects LIB performance. According to Islam, this particular nozzle was developed based on technologies used in the pharmaceutical sector for spray drying particles for inhalable drugs, which require very fine particle sizes.

While brine and spodumene produce the majority of today’s lithium, in the next few years, other sources may arise due to high demand. “The mining companies are starting to invest in alternative lithium sources, so in the future, processing equipment may need to adjust to handle more impure raw materials,” says Melches.