Battery Technology Innovation/Electric Vehicles – Page 167

We’ll All Be Relying on Congo to Power Our Electric Cars – by Thomas Wilson (Bloomberg News – October 26, 2017)

October 27, 2017

https://www.bloomberg.com/

The cars of the future will depend increasingly upon supplies of an obscure metal from a country in the African tropics where there has never been a peaceful transition of power and child labor is still used in parts of the mining industry.

Most major automakers are pledging to build millions of electric vehicles as the world’s governments crack down on climate-damaging emissions from traditional-fuel engines.

As a result, demand is surging for lithium-ion batteries and the materials needed to make them — including cobalt, a relatively rare substance found mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ground zero for lithium: Electric cars spark a new boom for Australian miners – by David Stringer (Sydney Morning Post – October 26, 2017)

October 26, 2017

http://www.smh.com.au/

A small patch of the iron-ore rich outback in the north of Western Australia has become ground zero in the global scramble for lithium. Here, work is accelerating to deliver the world’s next major mines to feed the soaring demand for the metal from electric car battery makers.

Almost 60 per cent of supply from planned large projects through about the next five years will be added in Australia, enabling the country – already the world’s biggest supplier of lithium – to cement its grip on the market, according to CRU Group.

The biggest mines due to enter production next year are both about 120 kilometres from Port Hedland, the gateway to markets in China.Altura Mining, which expects to start output in the first three months of 2018, is on schedule and already studying a rapid expansion to more than double capacity, according to Managing Director James Brown.

COLUMN-Nickel the latest metal to feel the electric vehicle buzz – by Andy Home (Reuters U.K. – October 25, 2017)

October 25, 2017

http://uk.reuters.com/

LONDON, Oct 25 (Reuters) – First it was lithium. Then it was cobalt. And now it is nickel’s turn in the electric vehicle spotlight. Nickel is just as important as the other two metals in manufacturing the batteries that will power the green technology revolution.

It is used in both currently dominant lithium battery configurations, nickel-cobalt-manganese and nickel-cobalt-aluminium. Indeed, it may increase its material share against cobalt, a metal that is posing all sorts of supply problems, both physical and ethical, for the automotive sector.

Growing demand from battery-makers will exacerbate “the predicted structural shortage of nickel between now and 2025,” according to research house Wood Mackenzie.

Mad Scramble for Lithium Stretches From Congo to Cornwall – by Thomas Wilson and Thomas Biesheuvel (Bloomberg News – October 25, 2017)

October 25, 2017

https://www.bloomberg.com/

For evidence of just how hot battery ingredient lithium is right now, look no further than Australia’s AVZ Minerals Ltd.

A penny stock until a few months ago, the mining hopeful has surged about 1,300 percent this year. The proposition: recasting a remote, century-old tin mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a supplier of lithium needed to power electric cars.

While its rise has been dramatic, AVZ isn’t alone in the rush to position for a rechargeable-battery boom. In the U.K., a company founded by former investment banker Jeremy Wrathall is planning to tap thermal springs in Cornwall, a region more famous for its beach coves. Other companies are hunting for lithium deposits from Germany to Mali, and even Afghanistan plans to tender exploration permits.

Electric vehicle ambitions spark race for raw materials – by Henry Sanderson (Financial Times – October 23, 2017)

October 24, 2017

https://www.ft.com/

Manufacturers are scrambling to seal long-term deals for supply of lithium, cobalt and nickel

As carmakers gear up to electrify their fleets, a new scramble for resources is under way to ensure there is enough raw material for a rapid expansion of battery production.

Electric car batteries rely on a host of materials — from lithium to nickel, cobalt and graphite — while some cars also use motors that require rare earths.

Prices have soared rapidly over the past year, with cobalt, a greyish metal mostly mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, up more than 190 per cent over the past 18 months. Carmakers and battery producers are rushing to lock in supply agreements from mining companies for the metals as forecasts for consumer uptake of electric vehicles increase and governments launch policies to back a shift away from combustion engines.

China’s Jinchuan eyes new nickel, cobalt project to tap electric vehicle boom – by Tom Daly (Reuters U.S. – October 20, 2017)

October 20, 2017

https://www.reuters.com/

BEIJING (Reuters) – Jinchuan Group [JCHRP.UL], China’s top nickel producer, will next year start building a new project in Guangxi that will produce raw materials for electric vehicle (EV) batteries, its chairman said, looking to tap the sector’s “explosive” demand.

The project, in the southern port city of Fangchenggang, where Jinchuan already smelts copper and nickel, will have annual production of 30,000 tonnes of nickel and 3,000 tonnes of cobalt by 2020, Wang Yongqian said in an emailed Q&A with Reuters.

The company’s three main metals “are all raw materials for electric cars,” Wang said, forecasting “explosive growth” in EVs in China over the next five-10 years. Wang was in Beijing this week to attend the 19th Communist Party congress.

ELECTRIC VEHICLES: The Truth About the Cobalt Crisis: It’s Not a Crisis, Yet – by Jason Deign (Green Tech Media – October 8, 2017)

October 19, 2017

https://www.greentechmedia.com/

Volkswagen’s failure to secure long-term cobalt supplies has highlighted concerns over one of the most precarious elements in the lithium-ion battery supply chain.

There is sufficient cobalt worldwide to meet foreseeable demand for the mineral, according to Caspar Rawles, an analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The real question “is whether we can access it quickly enough,” he said.

Volkswagen last month sought to secure a €50 billion ($59 billion) contract to supply enough cobalt for 150 gigawatt-hours of lithium-ion battery storage by 2025, which Rawles said could amount to roughly 30,000 tons of the metal a year.

Electric Car Makers Have an Africa Problem – by Leonid Bershidsky (Bloomberg News – October 17, 2017)

October 18, 2017

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Automakers find it hard to lock in the price of cobalt for batteries.

Volkswagen’s recent failure to lock in the price of cobalt for five years points to a serious problem with the optimistic projections of an electric vehicle revolution. These projections are based on gradually declining battery prices, but the scarcity of certain minerals and their concentration in politically unstable countries may interfere with that dynamic.

The high price of batteries necessary for a solid EV range is the biggest reason EVs now need government subsidies to sell in noticeable quantities. In a recent paper, Vrije Universiteit Brussel’s MOBI Research Group projected, however, that the price will fall to $100 per kilowatt-hour from the current $432 sometime between 2020 and 2025.

If that happens, electric mobility without much “range anxiety” (the worry your battery will run out en route) will be within the reach of most people who can buy a gasoline-powered car today.

Electric cars driving BHP’s nickel dream – by Paul Garvey (The Australian – October 18, 2017)

October 18, 2017

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/

BHP has flagged it could double down on its foray into supplying nickel chemicals to the growing electric vehicle market as it looks to capitalise on the “new energy revolution”.

The head of BHP’s resurgent Nickel West nickel division, Eddy Haegel, told The Australian Nickel Conference in Perth yesterday that the company was looking to bring forward stage two of its proposed nickel sulphate processing plant at its Kwinana refinery after being inundated with inquiries from the world’s biggest battery manufacturers.

He also revealed the company was investigating the economic and technical feasibility of moving even further downstream with the potential development of a cathode precursor plant at Kwinana. “The new energy revolution is coming and it will be very good news for our local nickel industry,” Mr Haegel said.

Dictator-Era Rules Stand Between Carmakers and Lithium Riches – by Laura Millan Lombrana (Bloomberg News – October 17, 2017)

October 18, 2017

https://www.bloomberg.com/

A little-known nuclear agency, designated as Chile’s lithium watchdog 38 years ago during the military dictatorship, holds the keys to unlocking the country’s massive reserves amid a nascent electric-car boom.

The Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission, or CCHEN by its Spanish initials, authorizes lithium quotas and exports in a throwback to a 1979 decision to declare lithium “strategic” because it was thought to be a key element in nuclear processes.

While that’s no longer the case, the government has no plans to remove CCHEN from lithium permitting even as authorities work on a new code for an industry struggling to keep up with growing demand from rechargeable batteries. More investor-friendly rules in Argentina have lured some interest away from Chile.

As race for energy metals heats up, nickel expected to benefit most from EV revolution – by Henry Lazenby (MiningWeekly.com – October 13, 2017)

October 16, 2017

http://www.miningweekly.com/

VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – Nickel prices stand most to gain from the advent of electric vehicles (EVs), Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML) said on Friday in its latest ‘Global Metals Weekly’ report.

According to the research team, despite China remaining an important driver of market demand, following on from being the secular demand driver for metals in the past decade, a push to make economies greener has given rise to structural demand increases from a range of sectors.

“EVs have been a focal point of late and copper (batteries, wiring, charging infrastructure), lithium (batteries), cobalt (batteries) and nickel (batteries) should all benefit. While we are bullish copper in the medium term, EVs are unlikely to be sufficient, on their own, to drive a sustained bull market.

VW fails to secure long-term cobalt supply for electric vehicles – by Henry Sanderson and Neil Hume (Financial Times – October 15, 2017)

October 16, 2017

https://www.ft.com/

An attempt by one of the world’s biggest carmakers to secure long-term supplies of cobalt for its push into electric vehicles has been shunned by leading producers of the metal.

Volkswagen issued a tender last month seeking a minimum of five years of supply at a fixed price, according to people familiar with the process, but struggled to find any takers.

The carmaker put off miners by suggesting a price that was well below current market prices, which have jumped by more than 80 per cent this year, the people said. “They’re being arrogant because they’re automotive and they’re used to doing it,” one trader said. “They completely misjudged the contents of the tender. There’s no point negotiating — it’s not even a discussion point.”

The Supply Chain Can’t Handle Skyrocketing Demand for Lithium-Ion Batteries – by Louise Matsakis (Motherboard/Vice – October 11, 2017)

October 12, 2017

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/

Less than 1 percent of cars worldwide run electric, but they’re increasingly gobbling up Earth’s lithium-ion battery supply. Almost half of these batteries are used in the automotive industry, according to a new a analysis published Wednesday in Joule, the sister journal to Cell that addresses sustainable energy.

The study argues that the world needs to start preparing for an influx of demand for these batteries, which are used in smartphones, electric cars, and off-grid systems, like Tesla’s Powerwall.

“Even before [the lithium-ion battery industry] went into these large sectors like automotive and grid it was growing at like a 20 percent growth rate,” Gerbrand Ceder, one of the study’s authors and a professor of materials science & engineering at the University of California, Berkeley told me over the phone.

Why the ‘e’ in e-car actually stands for evil – by Lawrence Solomon (Financial Post – October 6, 2017)

October 10, 2017

http://business.financialpost.com/

Electric vehicles are for city folk. For most rural residents, their role is to give, give, give

Electric cars, the vehicles of choice for the virtue signallers among us, epitomize the confusions and the divisions in society. These vehicles aren’t environmental exemplars, as their touters claim. And they of course aren’t economic. They excel in one area above all: in exploiting rural regions and their inhabitants, mostly for the benefit of affluent urbanites.

Electric vehicles — now a trivial proportion of cars on the road — do benefit the urban environments in which they operate, by limiting harmful vehicular emissions such as NOx, SOx and ground-level ozone.

If electric vehicles ever obtained a broader market, that urban benefit would increase. But it would come at a much greater cost to the rural environment, which electric-vehicle proponents would seek to sacrifice to provide the cities with electricity for charging.

Cobalt’s Chemistry Experiment – by David Fickling (Bloomberg News – September 28, 2017)

September 29, 2017

https://www.bloomberg.com/

All batteries are not created equal. The 53 kilowatt-hour pack on a 2008 Tesla Inc. Roadster contains an estimated 38 kilograms of cobalt, a key element that some analysts fear may be running out. The same-sized battery on a 2017 Tesla would have about one-eighth of that, or 4.8 kilograms.

That’s the best reason to be wary of predictions that cobalt is heading toward permanently higher prices north of $100,000 a metric ton. The complex chemistry on which rechargeable batteries depends offers myriad opportunities to economize on any material that gets too costly.

Cobalt is a crucial ingredient for manufacturing most lithium-ion cathodes — the “positive” ends of the cell, equivalent to the nipple atop a conventional AAA battery. Demand for such cathodes is set to soar as the world’s vehicle fleet shifts from petroleum to electrical drive-trains, and as utilities build farms of rechargeable batteries to stabilize renewables-intensive power grids.