Typical electric car set-up
Expensive energy-intensive processes are needed to make a key battery ingredient for electric vehicles. How does this make any sense at all? They talk about the factories needed ‘to meet homegrown demand’ – but where is it?
As Europe looks to declare its tech independence by becoming a leader in next-generation batteries, it will have to start by making its own graphite, says TechXplore.
The problem is, nearly all of it now comes from Asia, mainly China.
So France’s Carbone Savoie and Germany’s SGL Carbon, the only European firms deemed capable of taking up the challenge, have been corralled into an ambitious battery alliance launched by Brussels last year.
“Thank you for bringing us on board this ‘Airbus for batteries,’ though to be honest, we weren’t even on the passenger list,” Carbone Savoie’s chairman Bruno Gastinne told France’s deputy finance minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher on Thursday.
They were attending the ribbon-cutting for a new, more efficient carbon baking oven, a “brick cathedral” some five metres underground at its site in Venissieux, just south of Lyon in southeast France.
The 11 million euro ($11.9 million) investment will allow the company to double its carbon production, the first step for making the ultrapure synthetic graphite prized for batteries.
The carbon is then shipped to its factory at Notre-Dame de Briancon in the Alps, where nearby hydroelectric dams provide the intense electrical currents needed to turn it into graphite.
Carbone Savoie also says it has developed a new production technology that uses just half the energy required currently, and cuts waste levels in half.
“It will be less expensive and more efficient than Chinese graphite, while consuming less energy. The hard part is that we have to move quickly,” said Regis Paulus, the firm’s head of research and development.
“To catch up with the Chinese, we have to invest massively,” he said.
‘Can’t do it alone’
EU authorities in November unlocked a whopping 3.2 billion euros for the European Battery Alliance, hoping to attract an additional five billion euros in private money to build the factories needed to meet homegrown demand.
Automakers in particular are racing to shift to electric fleets, under growing pressure to cut carbon emissions and the reliance on fossil fuels.
Batteries make up around 40 percent of the value of an electric car, but are currently made by companies in South Korea, China and Japan.
Full report here.
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February 23, 2020 at 04:48PM
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