Key points
- Bob Galyen, retired chief technology officer of CATL and chairman of the SAE Battery Standards Steering Committee, outlines four factors behind China’s battery industry success: government support, private equity investment, available technology and human-machine collaboration.
- Galyen projects global battery demand reaching about 5 terawatts by 2030 and possibly 10 terawatts by 2040, with nickel-rich chemistries accounting for roughly 51 percent of that demand by 2030.
- He says a 75 kilowatt-hour EV battery using NMC 811 chemistry can require up to 53 kg of copper, 56 kg of nickel, 7.1 kg of cobalt and 6.6 kg of manganese, metals also found in seafloor polymetallic nodules.
- Impossible Metals plans to deliver harvested nodules to a third-party processor such as ReElement under a tolling arrangement rather than build its own metals-processing facilities.
