Nickel-rich batteries alone won't get us there, despite currently unmatched energy density and performance. Other materials are required, with an ethical, diverse, uninterrupted pipeline to boot, even if, like manganese or lithium-iron phosphate—the flavor of the moment for EVs—the resulting batteries demand some compromises.
Is manganese a good battery material?
“The higher number of minerals that go into a battery is a good thing,” said Venkat Srinivisan, director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS). As a cathode material, manganese is abundant, safe, and stable. But it has never approached the energy density or life cycle of nickel-rich batteries, Srinivisan cautions.
But with the industry needing all the batteries it can get, improved high-manganese batteries could carve out a niche, perhaps as a mid-priced option between lithium-iron phosphate chemistry, and primo nickel-rich batteries in top luxury and performance models. “We need tens, maybe hundreds of millions of tons, ultimately.
Tesla and Volkswagen are among the automakers who see manganese—element No. 25 on the periodic table, situated between chromium and iron—as the latest, alluringly plentiful metal that may make both batteries and EVs affordable enough for mainstream buyers.
Nickel is used in the cathode material for NMC111, typically sourced as nickel sulfate, which itself is produced from refined nickel. Nickel production is an energy-intensive process. It is composed of several stages that can be roughly classified as mining, beneficiation, primary extraction, and refining.
Where are nmc111 batteries produced?
We evaluated the production of NMC111 batteries considering the supply chains of the US, China, South Korea, Japan, and Europe. Regionalized (country/region-specific) conditions were used for the production parameters. However, some production parameters were not regionally specific in this analysis.
Fig. 4 shows the resulting GWP impact per kWh of NMC battery-grade materials under the first scenario assumption. In European countries, it varies between 47 and 57 kg CO 2 eq. per kWh, depending on the cathode chemistry and the location of production. These values are 30–42% lower than for production in China.