Webinar: European battery cell manufacturing

12 September 2024

The webinar centered on pinpointing the main challenges of large-scale battery production, what are the areas that innovation can make a difference, and how the European Union’s policy in support of the battery innovation can practically find its way to the Giga-factories.

CHALLANGES IN MANUFACTURING BATTERIES:

• Bozorg Khanbaei, Policy Officer, BEPA

The webinar began with a presentation by Bozorg Khanbaei, Policy Officer at BEPA on the Strategic Research & Innovation Agenda, which sheds light on the battery community’s priorities for battery manufacturing R&I funding and the main challenges in battery manufacturing:

1-INCONSISTENCY IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN

Best Chemistries are continuously evolving for the battery sector in terms of what’s the chemistry of choice, be it the mature chemistries, be it upcoming chemistries, be it the chemistries that industry or we call design to cost embodies. Innovation can develop the solution that is able to accommodate different chemistries. These chemistry should be adopted and accepted by the European ecosystem and the manufacturing system should be ready to deploy the innovation at the scale. However this poses giga-factories with a lot of challenges as we need a production line that is able to accept as much as possible different kind of options.  Another big problem is the fragmented supply chain and sector misalignment.

“The supply chain and the value chain sometimes show inconsistency, that raises issues.”

We we need to have batteries for different applications they require different materials, different cell design, different performance indicators that really means the different manufacturing also.

2-SPEED AND SUPPORTING REGULATIONS

We really need to be fast both at the political level, at the decision making level at the Gigafactory level at at the team, the plant itself, and at at the innovation community.We have different kind of a legislation and acts that really signal that importance of the of the of the speed.

The Net 0 Industry Act, sets as goal 40% goal of domestic production of batteries. We are not hearing very good news these days, at the moment we have only 15% of the projected demand in 20-30 being in operation. We are again seeing unfortunate news of cancellations and delays these days that really has made a lot of experts worry about materialising this goal.

“Again, we need we need a huge amount of collaboration to to make that happen aside from the support that we need from the public sector.”

 

3-THE SCALE

“Scale is the biggest elephant in the room, if we think about battery manufacturing no scale means no meaningful transition”

 

There’s no meaningful deployment if we don’t get to the large numbers and there is no business case and sustainable production for battery giga-factories. Battery investment in the battery sector in Europe is very costly, almost twice in China, the IRA in the US is really trying to narrow that gap, although we have very good instruments in Europe, we don’t have such a one stop solution at the moment.

4-SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability is the reason why we are involved in mobility, it has embedded in a lot of legislations at the European level, from the battery regulation with its battery passport mandates. With this carbon footprint mandates, again, there is an ongoing discussion, there is a huge push for the addition of the better instrument or more incentivizing instruments like app as power purchase agreements et cetera.

In the BEPA working group on manufacturing, we came up with some solutions:

• to have projects on the environmental sustainable production
•  addressing that uncertainty in the chemistry and the upcoming chemistry and the emerging chemistry’s uptake, what we call flexible pilot lines for current and next generation technologies.
•  solving problems with digital solutions (advanced digital trains in lithium ion battery production for the next generation as a as a concrete topic)

GOOD STORIES FROM PROJECTS:

We have already funded 11 projects worth of 75,000,000 on battery manufacturing. These are specifically talking about the manufacturing.

The broadening of the challenges, so this is not a mystery. We are having a lot of the the the portfolio of the technologies used in the battery sector are really increasing. The applications are really increasing.
So a lot of new challenges are popping up. We have to address that. So what we are looking for, as I mentioned to for you to let us know what are the challenges, what do you see are the the sector is struggling with at the moment and if you could also accompany that with solutions that come through the innovation so.

If you wish to tell us your opinion on the issues manufacturing is facing, contribute to our survey HERE.

PANEL DISCUSSION

The panel discussion featured experts representing Verkor, FAAM and ACC, all three companies are developing or operating giga-factories designed to produce batteries in Europe and they all shared their perspective on the challenges and opportunities in the large scale manufacturing of batteries.

• Yannick Molmeret, Open Innovation Project Manager, Verkor

How important is the manufacturing of equipment side for developing a European value chain?

Projects like Gigabit focus on the machine providers that we could put in our giga-factories, it is really aligned with European objectives to have production in Europe with resilience capacity.

“In the future, if we want to have a complete value chain for battery production in Europe, we need to be able to produce some active materials.”

In the future to be able to run a Gigafactory we need to have maintenance experts coming very quickly especially if you have a problem, it’s really mandatory that the European value chain works together on this challenge.

How do you think that the the wider community can profit from the work being done in  research projects?

Though projects machine producers, they they are able to test their ideas and their developments with two battery manufacturers. And from what I see it could be applicable from their point of view.

“And the benefit, in my opinion, to be in a horizon project is  that you have a real use case. You are able to exchange information with a company that is willing to do so. You make progress and you make progress in a direction.”

 

We talked about the importance of building up European manufacturing power. How important is this? 

It’s nice to do everything all at once and we have dedicated teams on all these various topics.
But but still so first we need to be able to to produce. You need to be profitable as soon as possible because it’s big money playing there.

 

What is for you the the main the main switch that we need to pull in order to get this manufacturing of batteries going in Europe ?

We need lots of people very soon to work in research centres and the MD for batteries. For 20 years we trained lots of people and when they wanted to work in the battery industry there were not so many job positions because there was  almost no battery industry in Europe. And now suddenly there’s a big battery industry coming up. So lots of opportunities for physicians, chemists, masters, engineers, PhD students with very high skills in Europe.

It’s important to keep the link with R&D from universities, research centres and so on, and that’s why  it’s very important for companies to keep participating in projects such as Horizon Europe

• Philippe Desprez, Principal Expert Battery Testing, ACC  

You are involved in ACC project for  many years, so you’ve you’ve seen the development from the start to where we are now. What activities can we do at at at this research level to to really help improve the efficiency of of todays giga-factories?

The first aspect is linked to resources, the awareness of the resources to the to the battery specificities. That means  in the safety parts, what what are the risk related to to the to the batteries. We need very precise steps, so it’s so it’s a mindset to develop the awareness of of what is a battery.

Another point of course to be profitable. Now Giga factory have to be profitable is also the loss cap weight. It is a key factor. The scrap is a key factor for everybody. You have also the very high speed. That means you can factorise very high speed production. So that means that you have also a mindset that you you cannot accept any default.

“You know, in the project you have to produce, but it’s not enough, you need to have these quality of details. You have to create the mindset, it is a mindset not to say it is not good enough for a giga factory. “

 

How do you see this this interaction between factory and R&D to to achieve this?

We are giga-factory level at ACC but we are also cooperating with many universities and research institutes in Europe. So we we see the both sides. And we are pleased to associate product, process data management, it is important to have also the full use of our European pilot lines.

The  first benefit for a giga-factory is to have a skilled people technician engineers which are already skilled and we can.

“In this very competitive industry today, the effort has to be turned into a solution and the solution has to provide added value for the final customer.”

The battery manufacturer will find a way to introduce the innovation because it is so competitive.

Where should be  the main part of the flexibility? Should the lines be flexible, the machinery be flexible or the humans be flexible ? 

I think it is a the skills of the people to know, to design flexible equipment if it is needed and also to  know to operate in different operating point.

What do you have to add on the new chemistry in the Horizon? 

We need to have a detailed understanding of today’s chemistry and the way you use it. We need to have AI work on current chemistry with electrolyte to progress on todays production and of course to  prepare the future. And we are part of that of course internally we prepare the future with new chemistry and turn on of course in collaboration with, with universities and with research centres.

 

• Carmen Cavallo, R&D Senior Scientist in Lithium technologies, FAAM

For FAAM you have a sort of strategy first targeting the stationary market, but I see you are agreeing with the challenges outlines by our previous speaker from the automotive sector, what’s similar what’s different in in that regard?

I agree with Philippe, many of the challenges are to train operators, this is for the automotive and energy storage.

At FAAM we aim at reducing costs at the minimum, our strength is that we produce half a GWh (almost 3600 cells) a day. There are challenges that appear even when you are running this kind of pilot for  8 GWh of production. Since we produce cells and then we produce modules and we do our own DMS, we are a bit more free to tailor every kind of aspect.

“I really would like more R&D being working in production for at least a year before coming back in their small RND lab.”

When we talk about batteries we talk about different challenges like machinery and components of the battery but also the people working together. So that’s that’s the challenge here.

What, what are the innovations or R&D that you try to put into the the process?

The main innovation and challenge is the production of water based LFP at Faam. We don’t use any other solution with except water which of course for the anode side in the graphite is an already known technology, but for LFP that is quite challenging. We moved to Generation 3 and the fact that we use only water is decreasing a lot of the CO2 footprint and also like the risk on safety

The incentive comes from profitability, do you see the same with the recycled content?

Recycling of LFP is not really economically convenient, for us we still dont recycle everything. If your battery is made with recycled material that is  more expensive than produced material.

So if the customer will be willing just for the sake of sustainability, to pay a few cent more, that of course is going to be done. Today, even a few cents for one battery it’s a lot of money.

We need the skilled workers, we need technical solutions, we need to have both the people on the floor and people in lab. What is for you the the main the main switch that we need to pull in order to get this manufacturing of batteries going in Europe ?

For me is the people. We need skill operators, we need battery programmes, we need formation of, we need engineers. We need people that they really know what they’re looking at and for sure.
Batteries are not like I mean they can be seen as other kind of devices.

It would be great to have more education and multidisciplinary skills in the battery sector.