And how Chinese companies came to dominate battery manufacturing:
Among the many factors at play, China's control of refined materials for battery cells and its advanced battery-making technologies are particularly important. So important that Western automakers who want to transition out of gas cars won't be able to do it without turning to Chinese-made batteries. That's why Ford has been planning for a long time to build a battery plant with Chinese battery giant CATL, the world's largest manufacturer of lithium batteries.
[...] But why does Ford feel it's necessary to work with CATL to make EV batteries in the first place? The simple answer is that Chinese companies have managed to make good-quality batteries in large quantities and at a low cost. It will be commercially unviable to avoid using Chinese batteries, and it will take a long time for domestic battery companies to rival the size and efficiency of CATL.
As my colleague Casey Crownhart explained last week, Ford's new plant will focus on making LFP batteries, which use iron rather than the cobalt and nickel used in the other main type of lithium battery, known as NMC. Compared with NMC batteries, which are widely used to make EVs in the US and Europe, LFP batteries cost less, have a longer life cycle, and are safer when it comes to the possibility of catching fire.
But just a few years ago, LFP batteries were considered an obsolete technology that would never rival NMC batteries in energy density. It was Chinese companies, particularly CATL, that changed this consensus through advanced research. "That's purely down to the innovation within Chinese cell makers," Max Reid, senior research analyst in EV and battery supply chain services at the global research firm Wood Mackenzie, tells me. "And that has brought Chinese EV battery [companies] to the front line, the tier-one companies."
As a result, "China is leading by quite a distance in terms of cell production capacity, and essentially leading nearly all of LFP production, which is now a very promising technology," Reid says.
See also: Ford's Reportedly Working on a $3.5 Billion Battery Plant in Michigan
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Ford's reportedly working on a $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan:
Ford's gearing up to announce a $3.5 billion battery plant in Marshall, Michigan, according to a report from Automotive News. In an advisory obtained by the outlet, the automaker says it will reveal the news of the factory on Monday in partnership with China's Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), a company that creates lithium iron phosphate batteries for electric vehicles (EVs), including the Mustang Mach-E.
While Ford still hasn't confirmed these plans, Michigan reportedly offered $1 billion in incentives to attract the automaker. The factory's expected to bring 2,500 jobs to the area.
The project is part of Ford's efforts to comply with the strict rules set by the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which lets EVs assembled in North America qualify for a $7,500 tax credit. Although the IRA also outlines battery sourcing requirements that discourage dealings with "foreign entities of concern," like China, we still don't know how the Treasury Department will interpret these rules until sometime next month.
[...] Even still, Ford's reportedly pushing ahead with the project. It could implement a "novel ownership structure" that would allow the automaker to work with the Chinese company and still qualify for the federal tax credit, according to a report from Bloomberg. This could involve Ford taking 100 percent ownership of the plant itself, while CATL controls operations at the facility and keeps the technology it uses to build the batteries.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27, @01:00PM (7 children)
Shift some manufacturing to USA and then copy their technology... 😉
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27, @05:10PM (6 children)
> Shift some manufacturing to USA and then copy their technology back
FTFY
I don't get the breathless talk of Fe in these batteries. I bought a Li Fe PO4 battery more than 12 years ago because I didn't want the potentially explosive Li polymer battery charging in my house while I slept.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27, @06:42PM
Any and all difficulties producing these batteries here and now can only be attributed to corruption, there are no technical reasons we can't do it. It's all about finance, that cripples all progress
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @02:42AM (2 children)
You really believe since 12 years ago there's no new technology involved in making these batteries?
Or you're just too butthurt to admit that China has made actual innovations in this area?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @06:43AM
I will admit they have innovated on lack of worker safety and environmental controls, which is why they get the privilege to do the dirty work on their soil.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday February 28, @08:28AM
There's actually been huge advances made in LFP tech in recent years, which is why they've gone from a meh alternative to NMCs to a better option for things like bulk power storage, so you're seeing LFP (easily) displace what would have been a job for SLA and similar, as well as encroaching on NMC territory from the other side. Problem for the OP is that most of those advances were made in China...
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday February 28, @05:43PM (1 child)
As I understand it there've been some big advancements in LiFe batteries in the past few years that make them far more competitive with "traditional" Li-ion batteries, which used to badly outclass them.
Probably mostly a matter of Li-ion having gotten an early lead that made them so much better than everything else (in terms of both mass and volume energy density) that it attracted more research-dollars for further improvement to make it even more better than everything else...
Until further improvements started hitting the point of diminishing returns, while their dependency on rare earths make them infeasible for the increasing demand of EVs and grid storage projected over the next few decades, and cheaper, more sustainable battery technologies finally started getting some serious R&D love.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday February 28, @05:47PM
I should say, there've been some big advances *that reached market*
Big battery advances in the lab are practically an everyday occurrence - but most of them never lead to practical batteries that can be mass-produced cheaply enough to compete with the ever-falling price of rapidly maturing Li-ion batteries.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by oumuamua on Monday February 27, @07:39PM (1 child)
And yet still fumbles the ball, losing some Nigerian mining rights to China:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/china-beating-us-nigerian-lithium-rush-race-go-electric [foxbusiness.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday February 28, @06:08PM
That is one of the weaknesses of a capitalist economy - it mostly only chases the easy short-term money
Investing in a high-risk political/business environment is essentially a form of gambling - and standard gambling rules apply: you should never invest any more than you can afford to lose completely. For a capitalist corporation looking to maximize return on investment, high-stakes gambling rarely makes sense, because the *expected* benefit of any single investment is low.
China's state-owned pseudo-capitalist economy though has a distinct advantage in that it can afford to gamble far more broadly, so that even if almost all individual investments fail, the winners still more than pay for the losses.
It's essentially a scaled up version of the same reason that investment strongly favors the rich within the US - because they can afford to invest in lots of high-risk, high-reward (and usually high minimum investment) opportunities simultaneously, and the occasional wins are big enough to pay for all the losses plus a big payday, while even a single such investment would likely bankrupt you or I when it failed.
Well, that, plus the fact that the Chinese government is also investing for strategic reasons rather than purely economic ones - they want to supercharge their economy on the backs of Africa the same way the US and Europe did on the back of China - importing cheap materials and products from a much less developed economy. Though in their case they're also explicitly looking for political sway - maybe not quite the explicit conquest and colonialism of Europe, but at least a tractable junior partner - China is big on wielding soft power rather than military power, but they still want the up-and-coming mineral-rich continent of Africa firmly aligned with their geopolitical camp.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27, @08:14PM (4 children)
While it's still slow being adapted, continuous development on hydrogen as an energy carrier is making progress. Fuel cells are getting cheaper, H2 refilling at high pressures demonstrated (same time as filling a car with gasoline), etc.
It's really hard for me to accept the huge weight penalties that come with current BEVs--due to the heavy batteries. Handling suffers, tire wear (and particulate generation) is worse and weight in general is just bad for cars.
So I'm holding out hope for H2 in the market. Perhaps a hybrid design with some batteries or supercapacitors for short term acceleration and regen braking, combined with the fuel cell for range. These would still take advantage of all the development in electric powertrain that is underway for BEVs.
Hydrogen progress is the cover story for the current issue of SAE Automotive Engineering,
https://www.sae.org/publications/magazines/automotive-engineering [sae.org]
Digital version will be free next month (possibly in a couple of days).
So, maybe the USA drops the ball on high volume battery production, but we leapfrog the Chinese with fuel cells?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @06:47AM (1 child)
Maybe we'll leapfrog the growth at all costs mindset and chill the fuck out, people. Sitting in traffic burning octane is about the same as sitting in traffic burning eco-H2 (generated from coal). How bout we all take another COVID break and start walking places. There's no rush, we're all going to die.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday February 28, @10:51AM
What's actually needed is both more work-from-home, and also more fungible housing. Not sure how it is in the USA, but here in Oz selling one $700,000 house and buying another $700,000 house that happens to be closer to where you work would cost you around $60,000 to $80,000.
As far as commuting goes, that buys a hell of a lot of petrol.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @11:10AM
I see a number of Chinese names here: https://www.ucf.edu/news/ucf-researchers-ethanol-fuel-cells-offer-new-alternative-to-power-cars-technology/ [ucf.edu]
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj1584 [science.org]
Korean names here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.8b00405 [acs.org]
Doubt the USA is going to leapfrog China in that.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday February 28, @06:29PM
Unfortunately there's a number of problems with H2 that make it into mostly a fossil-fuel propaganda tool.
1) to get any sort of remotely competitive energy density you must compress it to the point that you're essentially driving around on a huge bomb. Creating those pressures also consumes a lot of energy, which can be reclaimed by a secondary power generation system (essentially like air-powered cars), but that adds more expense and more things that can fail.
2) containing it, especially at those pressures, is extremely difficult (it leaks right through solid steel)
3) efficiency - producing hydrogen is currently very inefficient - I want to say less than 30% of the energy spent producing it actually ends up in your "gas" tank. And on top of that to *use* the energy you're dealing with either heat engines that can only convert throw 30% of stored energy to useful work, or extremely expensive and often short-lived fuel cells. that still only reach 40-60% efficiency, maybe 85 if you add more cost and complexity with a thermal co-generation system to capture waste heat.
4) global warming. Because of the abysmal inefficiency of producing hydrogen, the dominant means of global production (~95%) is steam reforming of methane and other hydrocarbons - which releases just as much CO2 as just burning the fossil fuel would, while throwing away a big slice of the energy that was in that fuel.
So basically as it stands today a hydrogen powered EV its a really expensive and inefficient way to use fossil fuel to power a car - consuming far more fossil fuels and producing far more CO2 per mile than a gas car would, while also being far more expensive to build and maintain, and much more dangerous in a crash.