Battery manufacturing faces increasing challenges. The surge in electric vehicles on top of existing needs for consumer devices such as cellphones and laptops has led to an urgent demand that is hard to satisfy. Furthermore, the battery manufacturing supply chain is highly vulnerable to disruptions.
Disruptions in Battery Supply Chains
Modern battery technology relies on certain rare earth minerals. Often, these minerals are only found in specific regions in the world and miners must use specialized practices to extract them. As a result, battery minerals are often expensive.
Furthermore, battery manufacturing supply chains are easily disrupted by the following issues:
- Extreme weather events can disrupt extraction, infrastructure, and shipping routes
- Geopolitical strife between nations can slow or stop the flow of materials and finished products
- Shifting trade alliances can impact licensing and access
- Corporate takeovers can create unexpected price increases
- Demand for certain chemicals can change as battery chemistries evolve
Any interruption in a supply chain can amplify the need for resources that are already at a premium. This can create bottlenecks, increase costs, and supplier delays.
Even when a battery manufacturer manages to obtain the raw minerals they need, they must be processed and refined. They also need to obtain anodes, cathodes, electrolytes, and casings to construct their batteries. Many of today’s batteries also include electronic components, such as circuitry and sensors. Any disruption in any of these supply chains can trigger delays, higher costs, and loss of market share.
Diversifying Battery Supply Chains
Unfortunately, China currently dominates the global lithium-ion battery supply chain. According to the International Energy Agency, they are the leading refiner of battery metals and produce about 75 percent of all lithium-ion batteries and 90 percent of anodes and electrolytes. They also process and refine more than half of the world’s lithium, cobalt, and graphite supplies. This creates a heavy reliance on China in most battery manufacturing supply chains.
Fortunately, many nations are now making considerable advancements in this realm. For instance, Canada ranked second overall in battery manufacturing, with the U.S. close behind. Finland, Norway, Germany, South Korea, Sweden, and Australia also ranked in the top 10. Expanding capacity and manufacturing capabilities in any of these or other countries could improve the supply chain resilience of battery manufacturing companies.
Organisations can also partner to move processing closer to mining sites. They can also improve recycling technology and scale up recycling operations to lessen their dependence on raw minerals. Opportunities also abound for battery manufacturers willing to explore innovative technologies to improve efficiencies and to utilize alternative, more abundant raw materials.
Finally, battery manufacturing can benefit from supporting services and technologies that can maintain battery life, improve functionality and performance, and enable more efficient disposal processes. Moving at least part of the battery manufacturing supply chain into certain countries such as the U.S. may also provide tax breaks.
Accessing Appropriate Battery Manufacturing Resources
EarlyBirds can help organisations identify innovations suitable for all areas of battery manufacturing. We offer four pathways towards successful innovation and the following benefits:
- Reduced cost of innovation
- Quick increases in innovation capability, when required
- Connections to the best Subject Matter Experts and innovators available
- Simple process
EarlyBirds Innovation Ecosystem
Our award-winning Innovation Ecosystem earned us the title of Global Open Innovation Platform of the Year 2023. It allows both innovation and strategic thinking in all areas of a business, whatever the technical or business challenge or potential opportunity your organisation wants to explore.
We unite Innovators, Early Adopters, and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to fuel rapid innovative adoption and business evolution. Early Adopters are leaders eager to identify new and disruptive technologies. They want to seize opportunities, solve business challenges, or create new products and services.
Our Ecosystem has a data pool of over 4.9 million global innovations across many industries with solutions that may already address your organisation’s challenges. Alternatively, organisations can list their challenges and request solutions from innovators.
EarlyBirds Battery Ecosystem Map
EarlyBirds’ offers a Battery Ecosystem Map to help organizations address pressing issues. It contains startups, scaleups, and mature companies involved in the core battery themes and sub-themes such as mining, refining, and manufacturing of cells into modules and packs, and the circular economy for reuse and recycling. It also tracks industry news from numerous daily and historical news and media articles from across the world.
The Battery Domain Atlas and Domain Monitor are also available. They have a comprehensive interface to explore and visualize results, create focused projects, and apply workflow to activities for enhanced collaboration and outputs.
EarlyBirds Explorer Program
The Explorer Program is tailored towards those who need innovation as a service to supplement existing innovation programs, or to conduct innovation projects when required. It is designed to speed up the process of technological innovation for the organisation as a service.
The Explorer program includes several features including quarterly and monthly innovation days; regular webinars to help stimulate innovation in the organisation; a focus on types of innovations; a platform enterprise license; and a nominated SME for the business.
EarlyBirds Challenger Program
The Challenger Program focuses on a single organisational or technical challenge. It looks for the most relevant innovators that meet your organisational, technical, and risk requirements.
The program is run by an EarlyBirds Subject Matter Expert who identifies your key issues. The SME then searches the data pool to identify and curate options for further evaluation. The most suitable option is chosen and the SME drafts a roadmap of next steps, POC, trial, or implementation.
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EarlyBirds can help your organisation access global innovation resources. We’ve helped those in the Public Sector, Food Industry, Retail, Healthcare, Operations & Maintenance, Manufacturing, Finance & Insurance, Energy, Education, Cybersecurity, and many other industries. Let us guide you towards appropriate partnerships that can reduce risk, amplify resources, solve problems, and spur innovation.
Organisations can register independently at https://earlybirds.io/. Alternatively, those unsure of which option is best suited to their needs can schedule a consultation. We use an individualized approach to ensure you find the best possible solutions.