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More lithium-ion batteries on the horizon.

Exide Industries, India’s largest manufacturer of batteries (not to be confused with Exide Technologies), and Leclanché announced the launch of a new joint venture to build lithium-ion batteries in India.

Both Exide Industries and Leclanché would like to catch onto the growing interest in the building battery business in India and multi GWh storage market for electric vehicles and grid-connected applications. One of the many new partnerships is Mahindra & Mahindra and LG Chem., but also Japanese companies Suzuki, Toshiba and Denso as well as Toyota are preparing to produce batteries locally.

The production facility ( in Gujarat) for modules and packs is expected to be ready in the second quarter of 2019 (initially cells will be sourced from Leclanché’s plant in Willstätt, Germany), while the lithium-ion cell production should begin in mid-2020.

Exide Industries will become the majority shareholder of the JV as Leclanché will be the strategic minority shareholder.

Sweden’s archive of drilling samples is key to unlocking its potential to mine the rare metals needed for the next generation of cars.

Being home to Europe’s biggest rock collection has finally come in handy for Sweden amid the global race for the scarce metals that power electric cars.

For more than a century, the Nordic nation has accumulated thousands of ore samples—so many that if they were laid end to end, they’d stretch from Minneapolis to Mexico and beyond. They’re stored at the Geological Survey of Sweden’s drill core archive, where visitors pay 1,000 kronor ($110) a day to examine rocks stashed in rows and rows of wooden crates in hopes of spotting rich deposits of minerals like cobalt, the bluish-grey mineral that’s got carmakers in a tizzy.

Initially extracted in search of base metals like iron ore or copper, the rocks are getting a second look because Sweden is a rare part of Europe that boasts all the raw materials used to make batteries.

“If you’re in mineral exploration, this is really the only place to be,” said Amanda Scott, a geologist who helps mining companies find the best spots for minerals like cobalt, lithium and vanadium.

The library is about a nine-hour drive north of the capital Stockholm, nestled deep in the forests of the Lapland province. The collection has long drawn geologists fascinated by the Baltic Shield, the segment of the Earth’s crust that encompasses Sweden and is rich in Precambrian crystalline rock, among Europe’s oldest.

But the focus has changed as the global hunt for battery mineral resources prompts miners and geologists to re-examine old exploration sites in places like Canada, western Australia and Finland, currently the only place in the European Union that extracts cobalt.

Bringing Sweden into the fold is important for European carmakers because at the moment, 60 percent of global production centers on Democratic Republic of Congo, where corruption is rampant and Amnesty International has chronicled the use of child labor at some artisanal mines. Most of Congo’s cobalt, meanwhile, is refined in China, which has dominated the battery supply chain.

If exploited, Sweden’s cobalt reserves could power more than 4 million vehicles, something the government is betting will revive the mining industry after this decade’s commodity slump stifled new projects. Last year, it issued a record number of exploration permits for battery metals, including 48 for cobalt, more than all the preceding years this century combined.

“Sweden won’t reach the levels that Congo has, but it can definitely play a part in the European market,” said Par Weihed, a professor in ore geology and pro vice chancellor at the Lulea University of Technology in northern Sweden. “There is very good geological potential for basically all critical metals.”

In a country that spans 1,500 kilometers from top to bottom, the drill-core library is the best place to start the exploration process. The collection was drawn from 18,000 drill holes and the cylindrical ore samples span 3,000 kilometers, six times longer than the U.S. Geological Survey’s research center in Denver.

Before spending millions on exploratory drilling, miners can take lengthwise sections of existing ore for metallurgical testing—grinding it down to see how much of a desired mineral they can separate out to make concentrate.

Until recently, cobalt—used to stabilize the molecular structure of lithium-ion batteries—was only worth excavating as a byproduct of things like copper and nickel. But its price has soared 140 percent in the past two years as carmakers from Tesla Inc. to BMW AG announced fleets of electric cars that will tip demand above supply in just a couple of years.

That shift has been keeping Scott busy. She opened a consultancy steps away from the drill core library in 2016 to help miners figure out where to start on-site exploration, and her client base has quadrupled since.

Australia’s Talga Resources, for one, used the archive to identify four possible cobalt hot spots in northern Sweden, including at the Kiskama mining site that had been a focal point for copper and gold mining in the 1970s and 80s. Some of the 95 samples dug out during that time were re-examined for their cobalt content.

“This is Sweden’s biggest opportunity for a real cobalt project,” Martin Phillips, Talga’s chief operating officer, said on the sidelines of the Euro Mine Expo trade fair in Skelleftea, Sweden, in late June. While the grade of cobalt at Kiskama is poorer than Congo’s, it’s easier to extract from the surface using open-pit mining because the ore body is a lot wider, he said.

At about 19,000 tons, Sweden’s known reserves are nonetheless meager compared with Congo’s 3.5 million. Even Finland has resources amounting to about 446,000 tons, although not all of that may be economically feasible to extract.

Yet the EU needs every ounce of cobalt it can get if it has any chance of achieving a plan unveiled last year to build a homegrown “battery ecosystem” that reduces reliance on Africa and China.

To this end, Finland—home to a rock library approaching Sweden’s in size—set up a state-owned company to support battery production. In Sweden, two former Tesla executives established Northvolt to build a battery factory with capacity for 32 gigawatt-hours, enough to power 320,000 Model-S Teslas every year with 100 KWh packs.

That’s still a few years away, and in the meantime giants like Panasonic Corp. and LG Chem Ltd. are dominating the battery scene. New Asian entrants Energy Absolute PCL in Thailand and China’s BYD Co. are also planning bigger factories than Northvolt’s.

Even if Sweden’s share of the pie is ultimately tiny, miners aren’t about to leave any stone unturned.

Scott’s other clients include Berkut Minerals, an Australian firm exploring an old cobalt mine, and U.K.-based Scandivanadium Ltd., which is searching for vanadium, a metal traditionally used to harden steel but that’s increasingly popular in making batteries for commercial energy storage.

“Looking at something that hasn’t had a pair of eyes on it for 50 or 60 years is awesome,” Scott said about studying old core at the archive. “That’s why we’re all in this business—it’s the thrill of the chase.”

“I’m living on borrowed time,” John B. Goodenough told DCD. “So we have to live day by day. We never know what’s going to happen.”

At 96, the inventor of the lithium-ion battery could be forgiven for taking a break and enjoying the fruits of his labor. But he is still working, still trying to create a battery that will solve the crisis he first saw coming nearly 50 years ago.

To understand Goodenough’s quest to build the ultimate battery, one must revisit key points in his life, that worked together to push him towards this goal.

The first came at the start of World War II, when Goodenough was studying classics and mathematics at Yale. Knowing he would be spending some time in the Army, the young academic was at a loss over what to do in life. Then he read Alfred North Whitehead’s seminal book Science and the Modern World, which analyzed the impact of scientific discovery on different historical periods.

“I just had a feeling that what I was supposed to do was science,” Goodenough said. “I had no money – how was I going to go to graduate school? I didn’t have the vaguest idea. But I knew if I had the opportunity I should go study physics.”

When the war ended, he was given his chance with President Roosevelt’s G.I. Bill which granted university stipends to help veterans readjust. “I was very lucky,” he acknowledged.

After studying solid-state physics under Professor Clarence Zener, Goodenough was given a job at the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There, he helped develop the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system for air defense. Not only was he part of a team responsible for inventing random access memory (RAM), Lincoln also served as the next pivotal moment in his life.

“It was interdisciplinary, so physics, chemistry and engineering were all involved together,” Goodenough said. “And that gave me the opportunity to really move in the direction of materials science and engineering. It’s that opportunity to work with chemists, physicists and engineers that really matured and developed me.”

Unfortunately, after a few more years studying magnetism and ceramics, outside forces once again conspired to change the course of his life. In 1969, Congress passed Section 203, an amendment put forward by Senator Mansfield that forbade the use of military funds for research on projects that were not related to specific military functions.

“There came a moment where they said ‘well you’re in a laboratory that is sponsored by the Air Force, and the basic research that you’re doing is not targeted to a mission. You can’t do it anymore.’”

This proved to be one of the most fortuitous lay-offs in modern history. After spending a little over a year working on a traveling-wave amplifier, “the energy crisis came.” Seeing people lined up at gas stations, Goodenough knew he had to work on something related to energy.

“So that’s why I turned to studying energy materials and then I was invited to go to Oxford. And I officially became a chemist at that point.”

The 1970s energy crisis also inspired others. Early in the decade, Stan Whittingham discovered a way to diffuse lithium ions into sheets of titanium sulfide, something that could be useful for building a rechargeable battery, and was given a job at Exxon.

Lithium ions are able to quickly and easily intercalate within layers of titanium sulfide, a reversible process which could allow the creation of a highly conductive, rechargeable battery. With a huge budget, Whittingham’s team set to work on creating the first room-temperature, rechargeable lithium cell. They succeeded, but there was a catch – “within months they discovered they were having fires and explosions in their batteries,” Goodenough said.

“When you charged them, the lithium formed dendrites that grow across the electrolyte and give you an internal short circuit. And that causes fires and explosions. So, at that point, that program was stopped.”

In addition to dendrite issues, the titanium sulfide was expensive, hard to synthesize, and posed health risks, so research was needed to find alternative compounds, such as other layered oxides that could be used.

Goodenough, asked by Exxon to join the team but having chosen Oxford instead, watched the program with interest. “I thought, now I’ve got students that need something to do, and I’ve been working on oxides for a while.”

So he decided to try to solve the problem. By 1980, he had an answer – to use LixCoO2 as the cathode for the battery. The lithium-cobalt oxide proved more stable and lighter than other oxides, and soon proved a success.

“That was the birth of the first lithium-ion battery, which was licensed to the Sony Corporation to make the first lithium-ion camcorder and launched the wireless revolution,” Goodenough said.

With that invention, and the subsequent boom in electronics, Goodenough became a much-lauded figure in scientific circles, receiving the Japan Prize, Enrico Fermi Award and National Medal of Science, to name a few.

But he was not satisfied with his invention, nor subsequent innovations, such as the identification of LixFePO4 as a cheaper cathode material. “When we were doing it, we had in mind that the people at that time were developing wind farms in order to get wind energy, and photovoltaic cells in order to get solar energy and they needed batteries to store it or those technologies aren’t any good,” he said.

“The wireless revolution was an intermediate step which was very useful for what it did and I didn’t anticipate how clever the electrical engineers were going to be in making all the things that you’re now putting in your pocket… but it doesn’t solve what we originally set out to do – this realization that modern society and its dependence on the energy stored in fossil fuels is not sustainable.”

Lithium-ion batteries have now matured to a point where they are viable for grid-scale energy storage solutions, although concerns still exist about how many discharge-charge cycles they can support, as well as the supply chain issues, with both lithium and cobalt being relatively rare.

Goodenough wants to improve on this, and also wants “to be able to make electric cars that are safe and that you can charge fast. You don’t have to charge them overnight.”

The current liquid electrolyte battery system needs to be charged slowly, and often with the help of an expensive battery management system – otherwise it can form dendrites. The issue is nowhere near as severe as in Whittingham’s original invention, but it still plagues batteries, and haunts Goodenough: “You’ve got to eliminate dendrites, you’ve got to eliminate the safety problem.”

Interestingly, the newest innovation in vehicle batteries isn’t some high-tech conglomeration of super-expensive materials combined with some sort of space-age biotechnology. Nope, the newest innovation seems to be a cleverly-implemented idea using cheap, light materials to allow easier electric car fast charging. It’s nice when things work out sometimes.

The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and promises to fix the slow-charging and battery temperature problems. Currently, electric cars take lots of flak for their multi-hour full-charge times, which are limited to keep the batteries from degrading.

Battery problems

This is because of a problem of lithium-ion batteries (the most popular one used in electric vehicles) called dendrite growth. Dendrite growth is where lithium ions tend to plate up on carbon anodes in the battery while charging, which is especially bad at low temperatures. That is why most longer-range EVs have battery pack heating. It’s also why they tend to charge slower in the cold.

Innovation

Here’s how the new innovation works. The researchers embedded nickel foils in the cathode that rapidly heat the battery cells before charging starts. This helps prevent the lithium from plating, letting the batteries charge faster and more often than older versions. In the paper, the team said that the new cells charged 4,500 cycles with less than 20 percent capacity loss, 90 times better than current batteries.

All in all, the batteries could charge in 15 minutes, even at temperatures as low as negative 50 degrees Celsius, and still last a dozen years. Meanwhile, the nickel foil adds 0.5 percent in weight and 0.04 percent the cost.

The paper says it bypasses trade-offs between temperature and charge times, solving the “Goldilocks” problem of battery heating. And I think that’s juuuuuuust right.