Lithium News

Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. is partnering with Finnish company Metso Corporation to develop the first lithium processing facility in Ontario.

The memorandum of understanding announced on Monday will see the two parties establish terms for developing a lithium hydroxide production facility in Thunder Bay, Ont., which will process lithium mineral concentrates for in-demand electric vehicle batteries.

The companies expect to reach an agreement by Sept. 1.

The completed plant will be the first vertically integrated lithium producer in Ontario, the companies said in a news release. It’s expected to create about 500 jobs across the Thunder Bay facility and upstream lithium project in Kenora, Ont.

Avalon president Zeeshan Syed said Metso’s “platform and technological solutions” in mineral development are a good match for Avalon’s vision for an integrated lithium supply chain in Ontario.

“We view Metso as an integral part of this rapidly growing sector, and a foundational partner in developing internationally best-in-class processing capabilities that are environmentally sustainable, allowing Avalon to meet the soaring demand for battery-grade lithium,” he said in a written statement.

The announcement came as Canadian businesses and governments angle for a bigger role in the growing market for electric vehicles.

Avalon said the plan fits with its business goals, and with the Ontario and federal government’s strategies for critical minerals, which aim to build up domestic supply chains for minerals required for the transition to a cleaner economy, particular zero-emissions vehicles.

“We’re honoured to play a role in securing Canada’s clean-energy future, and understand the important work that’s still required across both the public and private sectors to deliver on the province of Ontario and Ottawa’s stated goals,” Syed said.

Engineers from Rice University make advancements in prelithiation and unravel the mechanism of lithium trapping.
The potential of silicon anode batteries to transform energy storage solutions is pivotal in addressing climate objectives and fully realizing the capabilities of electric vehicles.

Nonetheless, the persistent loss of lithium ions in silicon anodes is a significant hindrance to the development of next-generation lithium-ion batteries.

Scientists at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering have developed a readily scalable method to optimize prelithiation, a process that helps mitigate lithium loss and improves battery life cycles by coating silicon anodes with stabilized lithium metal particles (SLMPs).

The Rice lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal found that spray-coating the anodes with a mixture of the particles and a surfactant improves battery life by 22% to 44%. Battery cells with a greater amount of the coating initially achieved a higher stability and cycle life. However, there was a drawback: When cycled at full capacity, a larger amount of the particle coating led to more lithium trapping, causing the battery to fade more rapidly in subsequent cycles.

The study is published in ACS Applied Energy Materials.

Replacing graphite with silicon in lithium-ion batteries would significantly improve their energy density ⎯ the amount of energy stored relative to weight and size ⎯ because graphite, which is made of carbon, can pack fewer lithium ions than silicon. It takes six carbon atoms for every single lithium-ion, while just one silicon atom can bond with as many as four lithium ions.

“Silicon is one of those materials that has the capability to really improve the energy density for the anode side of lithium-ion batteries,” Biswal said. “That’s why there’s currently this push in battery science to replace graphite anodes with silicon ones.”

However, silicon has other properties that present challenges.

“One of the major problems with silicon is that it continually forms what we call a solid-electrolyte interphase or SEI layer that actually consumes lithium,” Biswal said.

The layer is formed when the electrolyte in a battery cell reacts with electrons and lithium ions, resulting in a nanometer-scale layer of salts deposited on the anode. Once formed, the layer insulates the electrolyte from the anode, preventing the reaction from continuing. However, the SEI can break throughout the subsequent charge and discharge cycles, and, as it reforms, it irreversibly depletes the battery’s lithium reserve even further.

“The volume of a silicon anode will vary as the battery is being cycled, which can break the SEI or otherwise make it unstable,” said Quan Nguyen, a chemical and biomolecular engineering doctoral alum and lead author on the study. “We want this layer to remain stable throughout the battery’s later charge and discharge cycles.”

The prelithiation method developed by Biswal and her team improves SEI layer stability, which means fewer lithium ions are depleted when it is formed.

“Prelithiation is a strategy designed to compensate for the lithium loss that typically occurs with silicon,” Biswal said. “You can think of it in terms of priming a surface, like when you’re painting a wall and you need to first apply an undercoat to make sure your paint sticks. Prelithiation allows us to ‘prime’ the anodes so batteries can have a much more stable, longer cycle life.”

While these particles and prelithiation are not new, the Biswal lab was able to improve the process in a way that is readily incorporated into existing battery manufacturing processes.

“One aspect of the process that is definitely new and that Quan developed was the use of a surfactant to help disperse the particles,” Biswal said. “This has not been reported before, and it’s what allows you to have an even dispersion. So instead of them clumping up or building up into different pockets within the battery, they can be uniformly distributed.”

Nguyen explained that mixing the particles with a solvent without the surfactant will not result in a uniform coating. Moreover, spray-coating proved better at achieving an even distribution than other methods of application onto anodes.

“The spray-coating method is compatible with large-scale manufacturing,” Nguyen said.

Controlling the cycling capacity of the cell is crucial to the process.

“If you do not control the capacity at which you cycle the cell, a higher amount of particles will trigger this lithium-trapping mechanism we discovered and described in the paper,” Nguyen said. “But if you cycle the cell with an even distribution of the coating, then lithium trapping won’t happen.

“If we find ways to avoid lithium trapping by optimizing cycling strategies and the SLMP amount, that would allow us to better exploit the higher energy density of silicon-based anodes.”

A top Argentine crude exporter plans to start exploring for lithium in the latest case of oil and gas producers joining the rush for the battery metal in a pivot away from fossil fuels.

Pan American Energy Group will dig exploratory wells in Argentina’s Andean salt flats by year-end, according to a person familiar with the matter, who isn’t authorized to speak publicly. The company was founded by the billionaire Bulgheroni family, which still owns 25% and keeps family members in the chairman and CEO roles. BP Plc owns 50% and China’s CNOOC owns the other 25%.

Pan American Energy’s exploration around the Dead Man salt lake in Catamarca province — part of South America’s lithium triangle — comes as oil firms globally start to diversify into the key component in electric-vehicle batteries.

In Argentina, it brings into focus efforts by local fossil fuel drillers to plant a flag in the country’s lithium extraction industry — the fastest-growing in the world — at a time when calls are getting louder to channel production into sophisticated homegrown manufacturing to supply battery and EV makers.

State-run oil firm YPF SA, mostly focused on unearthing Argentina’s shale riches, recently bought lithium acreage in Catamarca while spearheading national research and development of battery cells.

Buenos Aires-headquartered Pluspetrol SA continues to develop acreage after selling a project last year to China’s Ganfeng Lithium Group Co. Tecpetrol SA, another major shale operator that’s part of billionaire Paolo Rocca’s Techint empire, has been trying to buy a lithium asset in Salta province.

Pan American Energy’s other foray into lithium, on the Salinas Grandes salt lake straddling Salta and Jujuy, is struggling to progress because of a broader conflict in that region with local communities, the person said.

A spokesman for the closely held firm declined to comment on the Catamarca or Salinas Grandes projects.

Argentina has three lithium salt flats in production, with another five projects under construction and 31 more in advanced exploration or feasibility analysis.

Two teams of solar-power engineers, one led by a large group at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie GmbH, the other led by a group at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, has found two ways to improve the efficiency of solar cells by getting silicon and perovskite to work together better. Both teams have published papers in the journal Science outlining the details of their work and the results of their testing. Stefaan De Wolf and Erkan Aydin, with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining the work done by both teams. Prior research has shown that due to silicon limitations, only a narrow part of the sunlight frequency band can be converted into electricity—this limits its theoretical efficiency to 29.4%. To get around this limit, solar engineers have tried adding other materials as a separate layer that can be used to convert light in other frequencies into electricity. One such material is perovskite—a crystal grown from a titanium and calcium mix. While it has shown promise, it has limited utility due to its tendency to allow some electrons to be reabsorbed into the crystal before they can be used to make electricity. In these two new efforts, both teams have found a way around this problem, each using a different approach. In the first effort, the engineers injected liquid piperazinium iodide into a layer of perovskite that had already been applied to a layer of silicon. Their technique proved to be 32.5% efficient during testing. In the second effort, the team developed a process that involved coating a layer of silicon with precursor chemicals and then adding a second chemical that set off a reaction that led to the formation of a perovskite coating. The result was a coating with reduced defects that allowed fewer electrons to wander back into the crystal. Testing showed the two-step process could be used to produce solar cells that were 31.2% efficient. Both teams acknowledge that their techniques were applied to solar cells much smaller than those used commercially; thus, a means for scaling them up is required before either could be used for traditional solar-cell applications.

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, rechargeable batteries that can store energy via the reversible reduction of lithium ions, are among the most widespread battery technologies, due to their remarkable performance and extended life cycle. Many existing and emerging technologies are currently powered by these batteries, including smartphones, laptops and electric vehicles.

Despite their advantages, Li-ion batteries are becoming increasingly expensive, as they contain materials that are in high demand and difficult to source in large quantities, such as cobalt (Co) and nickel (Ni). Battery manufacturers and energy experts have thus been trying to identify alternative designs that require little or no cobalt and nickel, as they could reduce the costs of Li-ion batteries and facilitate their large-scale production.

Researchers at University of California Irvine, and other institutes across the United States recently introduced a new strategy to create cobalt-free cathodes for Li-ion batteries that do not adversely impact the batteries’ performance. Their study, featured in Nature Energy, was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technology Office.

“Our project started in 2018 and ended in March 2023,” Huolin Xin, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “When we began our research, the whole industry was working on ultrahigh-Ni cathode to replace or lower Co use. In 2019, the problem of Ni becoming the next pain point for the EV industry has already formed in my mind, because I found that the price of Ni had already increased to one third of Co’s price. During a project review meeting at the end of 2019, on behalf of my team, I made a few new year’s resolutions, one of which was to create a low-Ni, high-Mn, Co-free cathode to circumvent the Ni pain point.”

In 2020, Xin and his colleagues devised a new strategy to achieve zero-strain in a high-Ni (Ni-80%) cathode active material (CAM). Their strategy is based on so-called concentration complex doping, a technique to change the properties of materials using specific chemical substances (i.e., dopants).

“After this previous study was published in Nature, I told my team that we should try to apply this strategy to create a low-Ni CAM,” Xin explained. “Very successfully, we quickly showed that the concentration complex doping strategy can enable a commercially viable low-Ni, high-Mn CAM.

The concentration complex doping strategy proposed by Xin and his colleagues has several notable advantages. Via low cation mixing, it was found to enable a high capacity of 190 mAh/g at C/10 and a high specific energy of 700 wh/kg at C/3 in cathode materials, as well as a high thermal stability and long battery lifecycles.

“Our proposed strategy is low cost because it is cobalt-free, Ni content is reduced by 50%, and Mn, the main material we use, is cheap,” Xin said. “We demonstrated low cation mixing that unlocks high capacity (190 mAh/g at C/10) and high specific energy (700 wh/kg at C/3), a high thermal stability that outperforms that of NMC-532 and a long cycle life reaching >4000 cycles, which makes it competitive against LFP cells.”

In contrast with other proposed strategies to reduce the reliance of Li-ion batteries on Co and Ni, the approach introduced by Xin and his colleagues does not require the coating of the materials’ surface. This makes it easier to implement on a large-scale.

In initial tests, Co-free cathodes created using the team’s strategy performed remarkably well, enabling the fabrication of stable and efficient Li-ion batteries with long lifecycles. In the future, it could be used to create more affordable Li-ion batteries for a wide range of applications, while also potentially inspiring the introduction of similar doping-based approaches to create cobalt-free batteries.

“We are now working on next-gen CAMs that have even lower-Ni/Co content which will again lower the cost of CAM materials,” Xin added.