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Ones which can be squeezed more > -- Cost of making battery chemical contents > -- Cost of assembling rest of complete battery Mining, and refining is pretty
by baybal2 6y ago
Ones which can be squeezed more
> -- Cost of making battery chemical contents
> -- Cost of assembling rest of complete battery
Mining, and refining is pretty efficient at this point, even when Chinese dominate the market. It's cathode materials which is the single biggest cost point. Cathode materials are dominated by Japanese companies, especially nickel based ones.
LFP is so cheap because making cathode powder for them is a fairly low-tech process with many Chinese garage scale chem companies jumping on it 10 years ago.
Nickel based cathodes are on other hand fairly hard to make with competitive capacities because control of particle size, structure, and shape is a tightly held chemical black magic.
For this reason, I don't expect the new generation of 200WH/kg+ LFP cathodes to be that cheap in comparison to nickel ones.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 6y ago> Mining, and refining is pretty efficient at this point Hardly. Nickel goes through a rube-goldberg process of extraction, smelting into pure nickel, made into a sulfate, transported around the world, remade into a nickel carbonate, and finally input into cathode manufacture. The supply chain simply isn't set up for batteries yet. Nickel metal powder is the best form to transport, and likely the best input for cathode manufacture as well. But the industry formed around the sulfate which was a mature market from other industrial use.