Supporting the sustainable battery-grade materials supply chain: selected challenges and proposed ways to address them
For the last three decades, rechargeable battery technologies were growing mostly through incremental improvements in energy, power, cost, etc. This steady growth occurred in parallel to an exponential growth in market demand for batteries, with multiple battery applications defined by varied requirements (energy, power, footprint, etc.). The shortage of critical minerals opened the door for energy storage diversity, but also complicated the technology landscape. Currently, the technology landscape is defined by the struggle between technology diversity and the need for standardisation.
A need to think differently about the tension between consumer expectations that EV prices will fall and the lithium industry’s reward for taking risk.
Possibly never before has the resources sector been so closely connected to consumers as it is through the lithium-ion battery. With this close connection comes a once in a generation opportunity. It also brings far reaching challenges as a consequence of consumer’s expectations:
· Purity – batteries need to be safe under all conditions of use which requires that their chemical constituents contain almost zero impurity · Sustainability - production processes should be carbon neutral · Value - an expectation that price per unit of performance will fall with time.
Purity and sustainability will be familiar to those who have attended recent conferences about battery chemicals. Value could surprise, as few of us like to accept that prices could fall. However, this issue will become a potential source of tension between automakers eager to attract consumers and lithium suppliers keen to be rewarded for taking risks.
How the lithium supply industry could help reconcile this tension is the subject of this keynote address. The scale of the growth which is envisaged and the need to think differently as source of energy rather than an industrial raw material calls for a different approach.
Spodumene to Lithium Chemicals - A Work in Progress
Assembly line lithium-ion batteries and their associated value chain are new. Producing EVs in volume to accelerate decarbonisation is new.
Spodumene represents the first step in the lithium value chain for about half of the primary lithium used in batteries. What is spodumene? Where does it fit into lithium-ion battery production? Where does Australia fit into this? What are the technical challenges in converting spodumene to lithium chemicals or metal? Let’s have a look at how key lithium chemicals are produced, the engineering and chemistry options and how engineers are trying now to future-proof plants to adapt to evolving lithium-ion battery chemistries.
