Lithium News

In what is just the next installment of solid-state battery factory developments by a Chinese company battling for market share, Jiangxi Judian New Energy Technology broke grounds on a new US$1.39 billion solid-state battery facility with a planned annual capacity of 10GWh when fully operational. Solid-state batteries can offer up to 500 Wh/kg energy density in the footprint of current EV cells with liquid electrolyte, and are much less prone to thermal runaway. They are still very expensive to make, though, and may be reserved for premium electric vehicles at first. One way to lower their costs is to produce them at scale, so every mass solid-state battery production announcement should in theory be a welcome news for the industry. The 10GWh solid-state battery plant construction start, however, seems to have sparked some overcapacity fears in China which will be producing 4,800GWh of batteries by 2025 if all planned projects pan out. This is four times the amount that the local manufacturers need and may result in an EV battery glut just when the US and Europe are also battling for EV battery plants with various generous incentives or direct subsidy schemes. For instance, the solid-state battery maker ProLogium recently informed that it has chosen France for its US$5.85 billion factory with 48GWh annual capacity, as the US government subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act don’t kick in before the plant is operational. In China, a few other large solid-state battery factory plans have been announced, too. Their initiators range from startups like TNE, to one by the biggest lithium refiner Ganfeng. TNE, in particular, says that its 12GWh plant will aim to lower solid-state battery prices until EVs with them hit cost parity with gas-powered vehicles. For startups or raw material refiners, moving directly to solid-state batteries at scale is a way to wiggle into the lucrative market without directly competing with established behemoths like CATL or BYD. That being said, Jiangxi Judian kept mum on the exact solid-state battery technology it will use to make the cells in the new factory. Its researchers, however, have patents over a novel silicon-carbon anode material. According to local industry exec Davis Zhang “a 10GWh capacity is not a small battery production project,” adding that “solid-state batteries might represent the future of the industry, but overcapacity woes are looming.” They may have a point, as six of the top 10 EV battery makers hail from China, offering more than sixty percent of the world’s total production capacity. Adding new solid-state battery plants to the mix means that Chinese companies have to become even more export-oriented just when a glut of battery factories is ready to hit their main markets. Tesla has 40% Chinese companies in its battery supply chain which may be why it warned about a tax credit reduction for some of its vehicles next year. It is expanding its 4680 battery production capacity at the Gigafactories in Nevada, Fremont, and Texas, though, as well as building a lithium refinery on the Gulf Coast, so that situation may soon change to the detriment of its Chinese suppliers like CATL or BYD.

After being stabilized in an ambulance as he struggled to breathe, Jonathan Harter hit a low point. It was 2020, he was very sick with COVID-19, and his job as a lab technician at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was ending along with his research funding.

“It was a weird situation where I felt a little bit powerless — again. I thought, ‘If I don’t create an opportunity for myself, I’m done,’” he said.

Harter had been in challenging spots before. A first-generation college student from the local Tennessee hamlet of Walland, Harter was selected for an ORNL robotics internship in 2016 that helped pay his way through nearby Pellissippi State Community College. When the internship ended, he had to convince his ORNL supervisor to fund him for the first time through another internship.

It worked, and Harter has continued tackling tough challenges at ORNL ever since. His initiative and perseverance have frequently enabled him to turn dead ends into possibilities. Today he is a technical professional in the Energy Science and Technology Directorate, specializing in electronics recycling and high-voltage technologies.

“I knew I could learn quickly. I just needed a few people to believe in me and trust me to do important things,” said Harter. “If you throw me into the fire, I figure it out.”

The first to hand Harter a big assignment was now-retired ORNL senior researcher Tim McIntyre, who was developing automation processes and controls for recovering critical materials from hard drives and electric vehicle, or EV, batteries. Harter credits McIntyre with providing him opportunities as an intern for meaningful responsibility and research, including developing projects and inventing disassembly methods and processes.

After Harter became a lab technician, McIntyre helped him improve his technical communication skills by sharing presentation and reporting duties. McIntyre encouraged Harter to act as a liaison with recycling companies to learn more about their needs, the technology they might adopt and details of their business operations. In many cases, companies indicated they were shredding entire batteries or hard drives for disposal without separating components for reuse.

Automated disassembly is safer and improves the quality and value of extracted materials such as copper and aluminum. “We like to talk about recovering the value instead of recycling,” said Harter, who earned two patents in the process.

McIntyre and Harter demonstrated the fast, efficient recovery of rare earth magnets from hard drives for direct reuse, which is the goal for both profitability and environmental benefit. They also developed automated processes to recover materials and components from EV drivetrains and automotive lithium-ion batteries. The heart of the process is a large six-axis industrial robot arm with custom tooling. The duo chose an older, off-the-shelf robot to show that the process could be affordable for scrap shops, enabling more widespread adoption of advanced recycling. The robot’s pivoting, bright blue arm, with an “elbow” that bends above Harter’s head, is guided by a controller and machine vision as it unscrews the bolts on an energized EV battery assembly.

For Harter, who takes all the safety training he can, working with the automated robot was appealing partly because its use could protect workers in salvage yards and maintenance shops from handling dangerous voltages.

Harter still hadn’t given up on the classroom. Educational and career guidance during high school and college were scarce. Although he had completed associate’s degrees in electrical engineering technology and industrial automation, Harter discovered he had not been in the right academic track to transfer to the University of Tennessee.

He persevered, playing catch-up by taking more courses while working full time. But then the automation projects began winding down and McIntyre retired. That’s when Harter came down with COVID while considering job options. He was finishing project reports when he got the call from Madhu Chinthavali, then a group leader in ESTD. Chinthavali had taken note of Harter’s initiative and offered him the chance to try a new research direction.

“He learns fast,” said Chinthavali, now head of the Energy Systems Integration and Controls Section. “This environment needs people like him, because when research morphs, he has the aptitude and mindset to adapt to those needs and take full ownership of the things he’s responsible for.”

Working on power electronics, Harter began creating a test bed for grid systems components and adding automation capabilities to the Grid Research Integration and Deployment Center, or GRID-C. But he also helped stand up the facility during the COVID shutdown with the help of only a few colleagues working on-site.

“That’s what’s really fun about this place: I get to do some grunt work, which I enjoy, and I also get to develop lab space and invent new technology,” said Harter, who has also worked jobs in construction, remodeling and carpentry. “I can take the initiative to pursue the things I want.”

Now a technical professional after completing his bachelor’s degree last year, Harter is recycling his own skills by applying his high-voltage knowledge to automation. Today he leads a multifaceted new series of projects related to automated recycling of lithium-ion batteries, which is vital to ensuring environmental benefit throughout their life cycle and beyond.

For example, Harter is focusing on advanced diagnostics to identify individual or failing cells among the hundreds to thousands inside a single EV battery stack. And because used batteries often still retain useful capacity — even if not enough to run a car — Harter is developing methods for combining them to build residential energy storage units. These battery clusters could provide a secondary home energy source when high demand causes a spike in electricity prices, such as during heat waves.

“I’m excited that automated battery disassembly is finally starting to be recognized more widely as an important opportunity,” Harter said. “I can’t wait to develop new tooling to defeat certain joining technologies, take batteries apart really fast, and put together all the automation pieces. That is going to be fun.”

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

Two lithium mine auctions in China’s southwestern Sichuan province that began this week have received nearly 7,000 bids, with prices hundreds of times higher than starting levels and rising as of Thursday, a provincial government body said.

An auction for a five-year exploration right to the Jiada Lithium Mine in Maerkang city that started on Thursday had received 4,470 bids as of 0855 GMT, according to auction data from the Sichuan Public Resources Trading Center.

The highest bid hit 2.5 billion yuan ($346.81 million), 783 times the starting price of 3.19 million yuan.

The other auction, for five-year exploration rights to the Lijiagoubei Lithium Mine, started on Wednesday and had generated 2,414 bids as of Thursday afternoon, the data showed, with bids reaching 820 million yuan, more than 1,400 times above the starting price at 570,000 yuan on Wednesday.

Information on bidders was not disclosed. The auctions will continue until no bid comes in for ten minutes.

Both mines are located at Aba, a Tibetan and Qiang autonomous prefecture in northwestern Sichuan. The region where the mines are located is home to about 1.4 million tonnes of lithium, a mining report by Aba government in January showed.

Zhao Hong, a mining analyst at Beijing Sheng Ming Assets Appraisal, said the strong auction interest reflected demand for the metal and limited domestic resources in China, as well as low starting prices.

China’s Ministry of Natural Resources said in June that the two mines would be auctioned.

Last year, a 54.3% stake in Yajiang Snowway Mining Development, which owns a Sichuan lithium mine, sold for 2 billion yuan at auction, 600 times higher than the starting price, according to a platform run by e-commerce site JD.com.

China, the world’s top electric vehicle (EV) maker, will see lithium demand for EV manufacture grow by an average of 20.4% annually from 2023 to 2032, while its lithium mining output will rise by an average of 6% annually over the same period, according to BMI Research.

The surge on the auction market contrasts a depressed spot market this year that has been weakened by slow demand in the immediate term and rising supplies.

Spot lithium carbonate prices in China are around 260,000 yuan per tonne, less than half a peak near 600,000 yuan per tonne last November.

Lithium-based solid-state batteries have some advantages, such as being less flammable. But they are also much less powerful. This is because the lithium ions in this type of battery have to diffuse through a solid electrolyte, which is a cumbersome process.

Using a clever trick, a team led by Dr. Ingo Manke and Dr. Robert Bradbury from HZB and several collaborators has now succeeded in observing this transport of lithium ions through the electrolyte in real time for the first time. They took advantage of the fact that lithium usually exists as a mixture of two isotopes: about 90% lithium7, which is transparent to neutron beams, and the remaining 10% lithium6, which strongly absorbs neutrons.

“We had the idea that we could use the different transparency of the lithium ions to follow their path through the electrolyte. And that works very well with operando neutron radiography and in situ neutron tomography,” says Bradbury. The neutron measurements were carried out at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, where HZB expert Dr. Nicolay Kardjilov has set up a joint tomography facility.

A lithium-sulfur battery with an anode made of pure lithium6 was manufactured for the investigation. The solid electrolyte consisted of the usual mixture of Li6 and Li7. “This allowed us to distinguish during the initial discharge between the mobile lithium ions diffusing through the cell from the anode and those initially in the solid electrolyte,” Bradbury explains.

Using operando neutron radiography, the researchers observed the diffusion of the lithium ions through the cell, while in situ neutron tomography provided a three-dimensional view of the distribution of the trapped lithium ions within the cell in the charged and discharged states. The study also involved teams from the Universities of Giessen and Braunschweig and the Jülich Research Centre.

The most important result: the diffusion of Li is not homogeneous and uniform. In addition, this method allows new electrolytes to be tested with the Li isotope Li6 in order to more quickly find electrolytes through which lithium can diffuse particularly well. “Elucidating the transport pathways of lithium ions through a solid electrolyte separator is a crucial step on the way to developing reliable, functional solid-state batteries,” says Ingo Manke.

The work is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries power smartphones, electric vehicles, and storage for solar and wind energy, among other technologies.

They descend from another technology, the lithium-metal battery, that hasn’t been developed or adopted as broadly. There’s a reason for that: While lithium-metal batteries have the potential to hold about double the energy that lithium-ion batteries can, they also present a far greater risk of catching fire or even exploding.

Revolutionary Research on Lithium-Metal Batteries

Now, a study by members of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA reveals a fundamental discovery that could lead to safer lithium-metal batteries that outperform today’s lithium-ion batteries. The research was published on August 2 in the journal Nature.

Metallic lithium reacts so easily with chemicals that, under normal conditions, corrosion forms almost immediately while the metal is being laid down on a surface such as an electrode. But the UCLA investigators developed a technique that prevents that corrosion and showed that, in its absence, lithium atoms assemble into a surprising shape — the rhombic dodecahedron, a 12-sided figure similar to the dice used in role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.

Understanding the Structural Aspects of Lithium-Metal Batteries

“There are thousands of papers on lithium metal, and most descriptions of the structure is qualitative, such as ‘chunky’ or ‘column-like,’” said Yuzhang Li, the study’s corresponding author, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a member of CNSI. “It was surprising for us to discover that when we prevented surface corrosion, instead of these ill-defined shapes, we saw a singular polyhedron that matches theoretical predictions based on the metal’s crystal structure. Ultimately, this study allows us to revise how we understand lithium-metal batteries.”

Contrasting Lithium-Ion and Lithium-Metal Batteries

At tiny scales, a lithium-ion battery stores positively charged lithium atoms in a cage-like structure of carbon that coats an electrode. By contrast, a lithium-metal battery instead coats the electrode with metallic lithium. That packs 10 times more lithium into the same space compared to lithium-ion batteries, which accounts for the increase in both performance and danger.

The process for laying down the lithium coating is based on a 200-plus-year-old technique that employs electricity and solutions of salts called electrolytes. Often, the lithium forms microscopic branching filaments with protruding spikes. In a battery, if two of those spikes crisscross, it can cause a short circuit that could lead to an explosion.

Implications of the Discovery on Battery Safety and Performance

The revelation of the true shape of lithium — that is, in the absence of corrosion — suggests that the explosion risk for lithium-metal batteries can be abated, because the atoms accumulate in an orderly form instead of one that can crisscross. The discovery could also have substantial implications for high-performance energy technology.

“Scientists and engineers have produced over two decades’ worth of research into synthesizing metals including gold, platinum and silver into shapes such as nanocubes, nanospheres, and nanorods,” Li said. “Now that we know the shape of lithium, the question is, Can we tune it so that it forms cubes, which can be packed in densely to increase both the safety and performance of batteries?”

Reimagining the Lithium Deposition Process

Until now, the prevailing view had been that the choice of electrolytes in solution determines the shape that lithium forms on a surface — whether the structure resembles chunks or columns. The UCLA researchers had a different idea.

“We wanted to see if we could deposit lithium so quickly that we outpace the reaction that causes the corrosion film,” said UCLA doctoral student Xintong Yuan, the study’s first author. “That way, we could potentially see how the lithium wants to grow in the absence of that film.”

Refining the Lithium Deposition Technique

The researchers developed a new technique for depositing lithium faster than corrosion forms. They ran current through a much smaller electrode in order to push electricity out faster — much like the way that partially blocking the nozzle of a garden hose causes water to shoot out more forcefully.

A balance was required, however, because speeding up the process too much would lead to the same spiky structures that cause short circuits; the team addressed that issue by adjusting the shape of their tiny electrode.

They laid down lithium on surfaces using four different electrolytes, comparing results between a standard technique and their new method. With corrosion, the lithium formed four distinct microscopic shapes. However, with their corrosion-free process, they found that the lithium formed minuscule dodecahedrons — no bigger than 2 millionths of a meter, or about the average length of a single bacterium — in all four cases.

Unraveling the Shape of Lithium Using Cryo-EM

The researchers were able to see the shape of lithium thanks to an imaging technique called cryo-electron microscopy, or cryo-EM, which beams electrons through frozen samples in order to show details down to the atomic level while inhibiting damage to the samples.

Cryo-EM has become ubiquitous in biosciences for determining the structures of proteins and viruses. Use for materials science is growing, and the UCLA researchers had two key advantages.

First, when Li was a graduate student, he demonstrated that cryo-EM can be used to analyze lithium, which falls to pieces when exposed to an electron beam at room temperature. (His study was published in 2017 in the journal Science.) Second, the team performed experiments at CNSI’s Electron Imaging Center for Nanomachines, which is home to several cryo-EM instruments that have been customized to accommodate the types of samples used in materials research.

Current batteries are limited by their required charging time and achievable range. The US Department of Energy (DOE) developed a fast-charge goal of 10 minutes to charge an electric vehicle (EV) battery.

However, fast charging current Li-ion batteries can result in Li-metal plating of the carbon-anode and the potential formation of catastrophic lithium dendrite shorts. Li-metal anodes have the potential to overcome these issues, as rather than plating Li-metal being a problem, it is in fact the anode, and moreover Li-metal anodes enable higher energy density batteries and thus EV range. However, to date the charging rate of Li-metal anodes has remained limited by the formation of lithium dendrite shorts.

Dr. Eric Wachsman, director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute (MEI2) and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland (UMD), and his research team developed a single-phase mixed ion- and electron-conducting (MIEC) garnet material which when integrated into their previously developed 3D architecture, not only achieved the DOE Fast-charge goal for Li cycling, but exceeded it by a factor of 10.

The porous structure of the MIEC garnet helps relieve the stresses on the solid electrolytes (SE) during cycling by spreading the potential uniformly across the surface, thus preventing local hot spots that could induce the formation of dendrites.

This transformative material and structure are a huge breakthrough that will be impactful for EVs and other applications. The paper, “Extreme Lithium-Metal Cycling Enabled by a Mixed-Ion-Electron-Conducting (MIEC) Garnet 3D-Architecture,” is published in Nature Materials.

The Li cycling rates (X-axis), quantity of Li per cycle (circle diameter), and cumulative Li cycling (Y-axis) far exceed the DOE Fast Charge Goals for current density, per-cycle areal capacity, and cumulative capacity, at room temperature with NO applied pressure. With this Li cycling capability EVs would be able to do 100% depth of discharge cycles every single day for 10 years, far beyond any anticipated EV lifetime/warranty requirements.

Dr. Y. Shirley Meng, chief scientist, ACCESS Argonne National Lab and Professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, said, “Wachsman and team demonstrated superior rate capability of lithium metal anode in this work, it is through innovative 3D design and the unique architecture such performance could be achieved. Such approach opens up a new paradigm for the design of next generation high energy rechargeable batteries.”

“In my 35 years of working on solid ion conducting materials this is the first time I’ve seen anywhere in the scientific literature the ability to cycle ions at room temperature across a solid ceramic at current densities as high as 100 mA/cm2, especially ions from a solid metal.” said Wachsman. The successful demonstration of this high-rate dendrite-free Li metal in 3D MIEC structures is expected to spur the development of practical “Li-free” anode solid-state batteries.

“The reversible high-rate lithium metal anode is one of the key challenges on the route to competitive solid-state batteries. Demonstration of current densities as high as reported by Eric Wachsman and his team may be a game changer,” said Dr. Jürgen Janek, Director Center for Materials Research, Justus Liebig University Giessen.