Everyone is looking for new ways to get a piece of the global electric vehicle value chain. It’s no longer just car companies or battery firms, it’s the full range of parts that make up batteries – from the chemicals that make up each component to the wiring and everything in between. However, with the noise of battery technology, it is difficult to go through future bets to make realistic bets. There is one country that could prove to be a happy hunting ground: South Korea.
While companies there made early advances in cutting-edge EV battery technology, they were quickly overtaken, with primarily Chinese competitors outpacing them in mass and size. LG Energy Solutions of LG Chem Ltd and Samsung SDI Co. have all shown promise but their global market share has eroded. They can be prepared to return.
Scientists have worked for decades to improve lithium-ion car batteries while reducing their costs. In South Korea, they are now focusing on all materials that can be used in different parts of power packs by playing with existing chemicals and battery architectures.
Even with 90% nickel batteries – the latest attempt to use higher-nickel materials to extend staying power – is recently showing the way to commercialization (by South Korea’s SK Innovation Co. ), further progress looks limited and the goal of mass electrification is far from over. . This is because such batteries, which account for about 50% of the cost of an electric car, remain very expensive due to production processes, expensive or hard-to-source materials and the fact that we have used chemistry to make them completely safe. Have not mastered. . Manufacturers are constantly having to play with competing preferences such as size for energy density, or limit for safety.
To address these pressing issues, companies look at what’s in front of them and make ambitious bets on untapped technologies that might work in theory, but only at some point in the future.
There is all kinds of research on the technologies ahead, but so far, development of viable power packs has focused on the material of the cathode, or electrode, which accounts for about 40% of the material cost. In doing so, they have focused on increasing the nickel content in nickel-manganese-cobalt, or NMC, batteries, which have shown the greatest promise in terms of energy density. These can take the most cars away, but their safety is not guaranteed and the price has not come down enough to make green cars more affordable than conventional cars.
That’s where the other electrodes, or anodes, (1) components South Korean companies have set their sights on. This part is mainly made of graphite. As the cathode hits its limit of energy density, chemists are now looking for materials that can make the anode more efficient. This will determine key factors for electric cars, such as how fast they can be charged, and create more practical battery technology for the cars – sooner or later – we all have to drive.
For the next, realistic step toward a new generation of power packs, it’s worth looking at the materials that will boost the anode. Silicon-based compounds have become central to this research because this material can hold more lithium ions than graphite, and it is the second most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, say analysts at Daiwa Capital Markets Hong Kong Ltd.
While silicon still has problems when used in batteries, companies such as South Korea’s Daeju Electronic Materials Co., which supplies chemical giant LG Chem’s battery unit LG Energy Solutions, have developed advanced composites to make the technology more useful. have done. They are now providing batteries to the electric Taycan of Porsche Automobil Holding SE. Another firm, Hansol Chemical Company, has invested 85 billion korean won ($71.6 million) to build silicon-carbon-based anode-making plants. This shows that apart from the trade-offs and challenges, there are other, realistic avenues to electrification that manufacturers are currently grappling with.
South Korean battery makers run the risk of being left behind when it comes to scaling up technology, as they did last time. Ultimately though, as daunting as getting into the basic science of batteries may seem, this is where real progress is likely to occur. And the country’s firms know this.
(1) When the battery is charged and discharged, lithium ions move between the cathode and the anode.
Anjani Trivedi is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies in Asia. She previously worked for the Wall Street Journal.
This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.
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