🚗 Car Talk - Issue #45 (Cell chemistries, Northvolt, Didi)
Hi friends
This issue comes after a small hiatus. Many reasons - an infant + an energetic kid with summer vacations, carpal tunnel, busy day job, and planned time off for mountaineering.
That said - I’ve been meaning to address cell chemistries for a while. It is an esoteric topic, but one that we must all come up to speed with really quickly. I hope you have fun reading it!
Buckle up!
Cells: To Fe Or Not To Fe
I’ve been crossing paths with cell chemistry a lot recently and wanted to enshrine key learnings for myself, as well as CarTalk readers. I run the risk of making this complex topic too reductive but I’ll do my best to get my point across as intelligently as possible!
At a high level (see? already reductive!), current electric vehicle batteries use one of two cell chemistries for their cathodes - NMC/NCA, or LFP. For ease of discussion, we’ll stay with NMC and LFP only.
NMC cathodes use Nickel, Manganese, and Cobalt. Three very difficult ingredients to get your hands on. Take Cobalt for a second - the small nation of Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for 70% of global Cobalt production. It’s not a clean mining operation - beset with child labor, public health deterioration, and even sexual violence. The amazing coverage in the New Yorker article “The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush” gives more color. Fair warning: it is not an easy read. Suffice to say, Cobalt procurement is contentious, dangerous, and makes a mockery of many human rights laws.
Fun fact - China owns 8 of the largest 14 Cobalt mines in the DRC. Also, China owns 80% of the world’s Cobalt refining (commercial grade Cobalt for use in electric vehicles).
When it comes to Manganese in an NMC cell, China refines >90% of it globally. When it comes to Nickel, things are more “fair” and China controls only…65% of the global processing. China has NMC production under lock!
Forgetting supply chain monopolies for a second, why is NMC such a beloved chemistry? I’ll link to this research paper titled “A review of conduction phenomena in Li-ion batteries” for an in-depth explanation but at its core, the electron mobility and lithium diffusion coefficient in NMC cathodes is 4-5 orders of magnitude higher relative to other cell chemistries. In layman terms, this means electric charge can be carried faster between cathode and anode. In even simpler terms - electrons in NMC cells are fast af. Even if you take nothing away from this issue, please take this away!
NMC electrons: Fast af
What do fast electrons have anything to do with electric vehicles? Faster electrons unlock cells that are:
Energy dense: you can pack more range per vehicle for the same mass of cells (or pack fewer cells and give customer reasonable range - not everyone wants a 500 mile range EV!)
Higher power relative to other chemistries: Want to floor your EV and do a 0-60 at neck-snapping paces? Go for it!
This is why NMC cells have been in favor by electric vehicle manufacturers thus far.
Summary of NMC cells: shitty supply chain, crazy performance. With me so far?
On the other hand is LFP chemistry - Lithium, Iron (Ferrum), Phosphate. This chemistry is everything that NMC is not! It is old-school - basically a 90s kid like myself! LFP derives from the Li-ion battery, which was invented at the University of Texas and earned its founder the Nobel prize. LFP cells use materials that aren’t as much under the thumb of Chinese production as NMC cells are. China does control a large amount of lithium production, but so do Australians.
Chemically, LFP cells aren’t as energy dense and high-performance as NMC, due to slower electrons as we established. But you know where LFP cells shine? Here’s where:
Cost
Battery degradation
Non-shitty supply chain
For #1, I’ll quote this research from Bloomberg Energy which concludes:
Lithium iron phosphate – LFP – however plays as a cost-competitive alternative (to NMC), contributing to the lowest reported cell prices of $80/kWh.”
Alright alright alright.
For #2, I’ll borrow a figure from the research paper “Degradation of Commercial Lithium-Ion Cells as a Function of Chemistry and Cycling Conditions”:
Look Ma, no degradation!
What we’re looking at is how much charge a battery chemistry can hold (Y-axis) after running a number of charge-then-discharge cycles (X-axis). Ideally, this curve should stay parallel to the X-axis (no degradation with charging), but LFP cells are shown to last longer than NMC.
Who uses LFP today? Buses in China, for one. >90% electric buses in China use LFP cells. Energy storage solutions too. And increasingly, EV companies! Tesla does it. As will VW. As might Ford.
Summary of LFP cells: Cheap, last longer, starting to get favored by electric vehicle companies. No human right violations.
Another analogy that might help: Think of LFP cells as the proverbial tortoise and NMC cells as the hare. NMC cells are definitely denser in energy (~1.5x more dense than LFP) but use them for a year or two and they might retain as much charge as the LFP cells, per the graph above.
I’m writing all this because the Biden administration recently released a 250 page plan to bolster America’s supply chain for commodities of national interest such as semiconductors, EV batteries, pharmaceuticals etc. As this summary article reports:
To support the domestic battery-supply chain, the Department of Energy will release a national blueprint for lithium batteries and leverage about $17 billion in loan authority.
Very good move by theBiden-Harris administration.
I don’t see NMC being phased out anytime soon. My hope is that western governments incentivize R&D of novel non-Cobalt & non-Nickel chemistries, as well as invigorating new ways to recover Nickle and Cobalt from existing batteries so that we don’t have to rely on China to power our sustainable future! I mean, just look at this:
If trajectories don't change, China will dictate the sustainability transition in every country across the world.
Mobility In The US
Lyft launches new e-bikes: For our post-COVID commutes, Lyft is launching new e-bikes equipped with a much longer battery life, a lower center of gravity, and a saddle that can better accommodate smaller riders. I’ll try to get my hands on these in SF! Link
Related Call To Action: If you or someone you know would be interested in collaborating on an analysis covering unit economics of micromobility (bike/scooter sharing), please reach out! I’ve been meaning to make sense and get to the bottom of this for a long time!
Big Self-Driving Kahunas Going Public: After a spate of recent consolidations in the self-driving space, the big three players are eyeing public markets. Aurora is eyeing a SPAC this year, Argo will do it within a year, Waymo rumored to start looking too. Bring me the prospectuses, the glitzy decks that will precede these IPOs - I’m here for them!
Mobility Around The World
Sweden’s Northvolt raises $2.75B: Furthering the LFP cause, Northvolt just raised $2.75B at a $12B valuation. Northvolt produces high-volume, low-cost LFP cells and has secured contracts from Volkswagen, BMW and others worth $27B. Northvolt is Europe answer to China’s CATL (the world’s leader in Li-ion cells) and Korea’s LG Chem. Link
For fun, take a look at how other cell companies are planning their expansion:
Northvolt - No where to be seen
Didi files for IPO: “Didi is not only known as the Uber of China, but actually beat Uber in the country and bought out its business there.” The filing does not disclose how much money Didi plans to raise via the IPO, instead just listing a “$100 million” placeholder. Link
Good Reads
Research on bike-sharing in Spain over 15 years: concluded that bike-sharing schemes only survived in large cities with more than 30 stations to go around. >60% sharing schemes flopped. There’s a lesson here around critical mass for micromobility services like scooters and bikes. Link
$1.3M: The price someone paid for a parking space in Hong Kong. Never realized that Crazy Rich Asians is a documentary. Link
In the EU, “company cars” are a fossil-fuel subsidy: This was a new perspective for me. Offering a luxury car in most of Europe is the cheapest pay-rise companies can offer, dumping huge numbers of heavily-polluting vehicles onto the streets. This needs to end. Link
How software is eating the car: “Once, software was a part of the car. Now, software determines the value of a car. The success of a car depends on its software much more than the mechanical side”. Link
What is a flying car: I’ll reserve my skepticism. Clink on the link for a couple nice gif’s of prototype flying taxis. Link
That’s all from me folks! Have a great week!
By Sachin Seth
This weekly newsletter on new mobility is curated by me as a passion project. Yes, the name is an homage to the NPR show of the same name! If you like it, please forward it to whoever is interested in this space. Cheers!
I have worked for many years on automotive products and currently work @ Tesla. All opinions are my own.
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