Open Access Article Originally Published: December 07, 2008
As Big 3 CEO's, the head of the UAW, and various invited economic experts appeared before Congress this week, one key witness was missing, which is ironic, because the success or failure of a revitalized American auto industry pivots around its presence.
That missing witness is an American advanced automotive battery manufacturing industry.
With all the talk on Capitol Hill this week about Big 3's plans to introduce advanced, plug-in electric cars, with the CEO's dramatically arriving to testify in conventional hybrids and advanced prototype plug-in models, little if any attention was paid to the fact that America has next to no advanced automotive lithium ion battery production capacity. With the exception of a currently shrinking handful of US-based firms, virtually all advanced nickel metal hydride (NiMH) and lithium ion (Li-ion) production is done overseas, mainly in China, Japan and Korea.
Two Japanese companies: Panasonic and Sanyo produce nearly all of the batteries found in today's hybrids, including those manufactured by Toyota, Lexus, Honda, Nissan and Ford. And Panasonic, whose hybrid battery production JV is now largely owned by Toyota, is seeking to acquire Sanyo, which would give it nearly monopolistic control of all NiMH battery production for automotive applications.
US-based Cobasys, originally founded as joint-venture between Troy, Michigan-based ECD and General Motors to produce NiMH batteries for the now extinct EV1 electric car, produces nickel-based batteries for the troubled giant's hybrids, but its fate is uncertain. Between legal spats with Daimler and product quality issues with GM, as well as management problems, the joint venture with Chevron-Texaco remains, at best, a small player in a rapidly shifting market. Two other NiMH plays, Colorado-based NiLar and ElectroEnergy, which also produces lithium-based cells, have run into either technical obstacles or financial ones.
On the lithium ion battery front, the picture is much the same. The literally thousands of finger-sized cells that power the Tesla Roadster come from Asia. The same goes for the battery cells the Chevy Volt, the extended range electric car on which General Motors is pinning its future.
The battery "pack" in the Volt consists of a series of battery modules, each similar to the starter battery on a small car or motorcycle. Inside these modules are individual "cells", each rated at 2-3 volts. These are connected together to make a module, which is connected to all the other modules to make a single 16 kilowatt hour battery pack, giving the car a range of 40 miles on electric power only.
General Motors contracted with two firms to develop the battery pack for the Volt: Michigan-based Compact Power, Inc. (CPI) and Germany's Continental AG (Conti). CPI gets its cells from its parent, LG Chem, the giant Korean conglomerate. Conti partnered with Massachusetts-based A123 Technologies for their cells, but those cells are manufactured in China.
So the lithium battery technology inside the Volt "mule" -- a converted Chevy Cruze -- in which GM CEO Rick Wagner arrived on Capitol Hill for a second round of Congressional hearings, ultimately came from Asian manufacturers, not American ones.
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8 comments so far...
04-Apr-2009
66350
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this is an eye opener. monopoly on batteries have its upside and downside. i guess if you can't go toe to toe with the global market then there will be shortage. Carrand Detail Brush
Posted by: Sarah Lewis
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08-Dec-2008
65083
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There may be technical issues that this article does not account for. For instance - liability issues.
The way most electric vehicle designers are going is to create very high voltage battery packs from a large number of cells in series. In such a configuration, the weakness or failure of a single cell can kill the output of the entire pack. It can also cause a fire in the case of a shorted cell. These battery packs pull a lot of power and if it tries to squeeze through a cell with abnormally high resistance, the result can be catastrophic.
The battery people know this and probably want to limit their exposure to warranty and product liability claims. The solution, I believe may be to utilize much lower battery voltages and to use electronic converters to get the higher voltages. Even a few catastrophic failures of battery packs would be very harmful to the electric vehicles chances for widespread utilization.
Posted by: Jonathan Cole
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09-Dec-2008
65098
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No problem with liability as advanced lithium batteries are now very safe. Compare that to a gallon or 20 of gasoline.
We also have some great US manufacturers like A123 along with Austin Texas valence safion and altair nano lithium batteries. Just place a few large orders and they will produce, the prices will come down and we could have many US jobs.
Posted by: jim stack
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11-Dec-2008
65114
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This was a welcome article. We could use a way to keep our eyes on the issues affecting the pace of the rollout of global plug-ins.
You went perhaps a little easy on Cobasys. If they have kept everyone else out of North American production so they could have it to themselves, then where the hell are the batteries? I don't think they actually want to produce batteries for plug-in vehicles (I think they'd rather that the oil assets of Chevron were maximized by going through this period of a dearth of batteries for plug-ins.) In my view the lawsuits against Cobasys and Energy Conversion Devices by Daimler and Innovative Transportation Systems, as well as the fact that we don't seem to see any of the plug-in manufacturers like Think Nordic trying to use NiMH for plug-ins, lend some credence to this hypothesis. We can hope that Lithium wins the day and renders the NiMH matter moot, but while we are waiting for this, we can also note (such as we see in your article) that the present-day lack of sufficient numbers of batteries is doing damage, and we can note the role of NiMh in this damage.
Posted by: Josh Landess
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12-Jan-2009
65505
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Another good article on the Asian Lithium Battery Monopoly and a podcast is located here:
Posted by: Joe Morgan
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08-Dec-2008
65077
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Very interesting article. Of course, given that Cobasys is co-owned by an oil company and a firm that makes a fortune selling internal-combustion cars and parts, how enthusiastic are they going to be about selling car batteries?
Posted by: Louis Guilbault
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08-Dec-2008
65086
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A major shareholder of EnerDel is ITOCHU Corporation, a 90 billion dollar Japanese Conglomerate. Exxon Mobil is spending 345 million to build a lithium-ion separator manufacturing facility in South Korea. Argoone National Labs sold global rights to a US taxpayer financed newly developed lithium-ion cathode material to Toda Kogyo, another Japanese company. http://www.carlist.com/blog/?p=1061
Where does that leave US manufacturing capacity?
Posted by: Harold Dorfman
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18-Dec-2008
65206
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Great Article!
I have been a supporter of evworld for a while and will continue to.
Please support thier sponsers.
I am also just starting a green transportation blog. Please support my blog and sponsers also.
www.relevantminded.com
the more people we have getting the news out the better.
Posted by: relevant minded
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