Battery Metals

The world’s biggest mining companies are about to start revealing how much cash they’re churning out from this year’s commodity boom. Look out for record profits followed by eye-watering dividend payouts. The top-five western diversified miners may have earned a combined $85 billion for the first half of the year, according to analyst estimates, more […]

Mercedes-Benz laid out Thursday a €40 billion ($47 billion) plan to become an electric-only automaker by the end of the decade, a target that will push the company to become more vertically integrated, train its workforce and secure the batteries needed to power its products. Mercedes has provided some wiggle room in that ambitious goal, […]

Rising demand from electric vehicles and challenges in securing raw materials will deliver a battery supply crunch for automakers already grappling with a chip crisis, according to a key Chinese manufacturer. “When the chip shortage is over, the major supply shortage the industry faces would be batteries,” Yang Hongxin, chairman of SVolt Energy Technology Co., […]

Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz vowed to spend more than 40 billion euros ($47 billion) this decade to electrify its lineup and defend its position as the world’s leading luxury-car maker through a historic industry transformation. Mercedes plans to launch three new all-electric vehicle platforms in 2025 and set up eight battery factories with partners, the company […]

Nickel is making a comeback. A strong pandemic recovery rally was rudely interrupted in March, when China’s Tsingshan Group said it intended to produce battery-grade nickel at its Indonesian operations. Converting what is currently a process stream for Tsingshan’s stainless steel production to an input for electric vehicle cathode chemistry would undermine nickel’s bull narrative […]

As tensions mount between China and the United States, automakers in the West are trying to reduce their reliance on a key driver of the electric vehicle revolution – permanent magnets, sometimes smaller than a pack of cards, that power electric engines. Most are made of rare earth metals from China. The metals in the […]

The Lightyear One solar-supplemented EV was driven 440 miles on a test track on a single charge of a 60-kilowatt-hour battery pack, Lightyear claims. The test was conducted using a “validation prototype” at the Aldenhoven Testing Center in Germany, last month, Lightyear said in a press release. While a closed course is very different from […]

Zeng Yuqun, the founder of the world’s biggest electric-vehicle battery maker, has overtaken Jack Ma in the wealth rankings, a symbolic moment in the rise of China’s green billionaires. Zeng’s net worth has jumped to $49.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as shares of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. surged this year. That […]

The true climate change impacts of producing battery-grade graphite can be as much as 10 times higher than published values, depending on the energy and material inputs, a new report by environmental consultancy and software provider Minviro states. The report is described as a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), whose goal is to show the quantifiable […]

Japan’s Sumitomo Metal Mining Co Ltd said on Tuesday it would spend 47 billion yen ($424 million) to boost production capacity of cathode materials for rechargeable batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs) to meet burgeoning demand. Japan’s biggest nickel smelter will build a new plant of nickel-based cathode materials in Besshi, Ehime prefecture in western […]