EV battery manufacturers develop new silicon anode material
15. June 2023South Korean battery manufacturers in the EV sector are accelerating their development work on silicon anodes. This new material could reduce the production costs of EV batteries while increasing battery capacity. Manufacturers are trying to boost the performance of EVs with silicon anodes to compete against the flood of cheap EV batteries from China. In many cases, products from the fields of batteries and electromobility in general require KC certification for Korea in order to be approved for import and sale there.
LG Chem plans to invest about $4.7 billion over the next three years to develop new materials for EV batteries. According to a report by Business Korea, research into new anodes will make up the majority of the budget. LG Chem, for example, is working on anodes made of pure silicon, while anodes available on the market today only have a silicon content of five per cent. SKC invested 80 million US dollars in Nexeon last year. Together with SKC, the British developer of anodes presented a new anode with at least 15 per cent silicon content. This is currently being tested in batteries from SK On. SKC is also planning to build a production plant for silicon used in anodes.
POSCO Chemical will start up its production plant for silicon anodes later this year. Series production and sales are planned for the first half of 2024. For this purpose, POSCO Holdings bought Tera Technos and renamed it POSCO Silicon Solutions in July 2022. Currently, Daejoo Electronics is the only South Korean company that has successfully launched silicon anodes. The material for their silicon anode has a silicon content of five per cent and is sourced from LG Energy Solution. Daejoo Electronic plans to increase the silicon content to seven percent by 2027.
As mentioned earlier, silicon anodes have advantages in terms of lower cost and higher capacity of the batteries. The current main material for EV battery anodes is graphite. It is estimated that a pure silicon anode could have 1,000 times the capacity of a graphite anode. The price of graphite has risen with the increasing number of EVs sold. The current price per tonne is about 800 US dollars and will rise to 1,000 US dollars by 2025. Last year, China contributed 82 per cent of global graphite production. The global market for silicon anodes will be worth 6.92 billion US dollars in 2026, according to experts, while annual growth will be 23.4 per cent.
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