Emeritus Prof Christopher May
Looks like the end for Northvolt, the Swedish hope for expansion of European battery production.... confronted with production & management problems, and the withdrawal of a major BMW contract, it looks like the firm will be entering insolvency in the next days/weeks...
This will leave most auto-manufactures continuing to be dependent on non-EU supplies of batteries for electric vehicles, seen by the EU as a strategic problem.
Will another start-up try to fill that space?
#batteries
h/t FT
Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖
@ChrisMayLA6 @Nicovel0 @John_Loader You can also refine Lithium salts out of seawater. Lithium was the first metal element to be made in the Big Bang and in the process of star decay, which is why there is so much of it about. Lithium mines are only sporadic because there wasn’t the demand until recently. It was thrown away in mining for other minerals in greater demand. That said, I’m not sure our geology supports mining widely.
John_Loader
@christineburns @ChrisMayLA6 @Nicovel0 Tesla batteries are very different to those of other car makers so a factory can serve more than one manufacturer. Nissan has a battery factory and Jaguar Rover getting one. As for lithium I gather the only UK source so far is in abandoned mines in Cornwall
Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖
@ChrisMayLA6 @Nicovel0 ..foundry in Dagenham casting engine blocks and my grandma sewed together the seat covers. I see none of that integrated vision in the way our politicians look at building battery assembly plants.
Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖
@ChrisMayLA6 @Nicovel0 ..they’ve innovated at each step so their batteries aren’t just the same as everyone else makes. They’ve gone well beyond trying to make a commodity product and the vertical integration means they have margin control because very little of what they spend goes to third parties as profits. Granted they also work with partners to get the volumes up but I liken this to the days when car manufacturers made key elements of the product. Ford had a giant..
Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖
@ChrisMayLA6 @Nicovel0 This is where you have to admire the vertical integration of Tesla. They’re building a plant to process the stuff that comes out of the ground from territory they bought in the US. They’ve built a plant to process the Lithium Hydroxide that comes from that plant and turn it into battery cathode material. They’ve built the plant to roll batteries from that material and make them straight into packs that they’ve built markets for. But more than that..
Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖
@Nicovel0 @ChrisMayLA6 I don’t know. Buying the machines that spread mixtures of minerals on metal foils and stuff the result in a can or pouch is the easy part. We could buy our way into ASSEMBLING batteries. But I don’t know where we’d get the raw materials because China has inserted itself into key parts of the supply chains. I don’t think we’ve got a true strategy for using what we make in stuff people buy, aside from some vague notion that it goes in cars.
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
Yes, again that's a fair comment (and an issue, like the politicians I had probably downplayed in my mind)... I guess this is where a concerted EU-led project might work? Or maybe its too late even for that?
Nicovel0 🍉
@christineburns @ChrisMayLA6 the only chance Europe has now is if they can leapfrog Li ion to salt batteries, but we’re lagging there as well.
Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖
@Nicovel0 @ChrisMayLA6 possibly, but any strategy to build competitive Sodium ion batteries needs to simultaneously establish a local supply chain for the cathode and anode minerals and (since the batteries have lower storage density) a whole range of downstream applications to keep the factory supplied with volume customers. I think politicians fall into trap of thinking about the cell factory in isolation.
Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖
@ChrisMayLA6 I can’t see anyone succeeding from scratch in a market where the entry cost is so high and the unit price keeps falling. Chinese manufacturers like CATL and BYD are on course to get the price of a kilowatt hour of batteries down to around $50 and the lead time into volume production for anyone else is such that by the time you get numbers up you’ve been beaten on price. The early mover advantage is locked in.
Annie Radetzky
@christineburns @ChrisMayLA6 @Nicovel0 @John_Loader it's a fascinating thread. Thank you. I just remember burning lithium in school science lessons because according to our teacher "it's cheap and has no uses". That was the 80s!
Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖
@Soupdragon @Nicovel0 @ChrisMayLA6 @John_Loader Those were the days — in the sixties for me. Thirty kids sat on stools round a bowl of water with no protection while the chemistry teacher cut slices of metallic sodium and lithium and dropped them in. Fortunately the school was not allowed Caesium.
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