China Plans Graphite Megafactories to Meet Booming Demand for Battery Storage

But could graphite still prove to be another lithium-ion battery material prone to supply challenges?

China is leading efforts to deliver an almost threefold increase in global graphite processing capacity by 2020, to meet mushrooming lithium-ion battery industry demand.

The Chinese firms Shanshan Technology, BTR New Energy Materials and LuiMao Graphite (in association with BAIC Automotive Group) are building lithium-ion battery graphite anode megafactories with a total processing capacity of 260,000 metric tons per year.

Hitachi Chemical, in Japan, is planning another facility to process 100,000 metric tons of graphite a year. The increases compare to a total estimated global processing capacity of around 200,000 metric tons at present.

Last year, graphite production amounted to just 100,000 metric tons.

The increase in processing capacity should allow the battery industry to churn out 300 gigawatt-hours of lithium-ion cells a year, enough to power 6 million Tesla Model 3s, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

But as demand for lithium-ion batteries continues to soar, there are fears the increase in processing capacity may fail to keep up, raising the possibility of supply-chain bottlenecks similar to those noted for cobalt and lithium.

Source: greentechmedia