Global sales of electric vehicle (EV) batteries will increase 3.7-fold by 2030, according to US consultancy Bain & Company.
By 2023, 10 million of these batteries were sold, a figure that will rise to 37 million within six years, according to the report “Navigating the EV Battery Ecosystem,” published this month.
Batteries are currently the largest cost factor for electric car manufacturers and greatly influence the performance of the final product. In addition, the supply chain for making them faces several obstacles, from the extraction of critical raw materials such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, to the production and recycling of batteries.
Despite this, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries are increasing their share of the global market.
According to Bain & Company, such batteries accounted for 25 to 30 percent of EV battery demand in China in 2018, a figure that rose to 65 percent last year and will rise to 70 percent by 2030. Globally, their share will be 40 percent of the total by 2030. Outside China, NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) technology will remain the most widely used technology in the world, accounting for more than 50 percent of all batteries, according to the consultancy. It ruled out that other emerging technologies, such as solid-state batteries and high-density sodium-ion batteries, will develop quickly, as they are still in the prototype and pilot manufacturing stages. Their share could therefore be in the single digits by 2030. Bain & Company reckoned that in the US and EU, LFP batteries will gain market share but will never become dominant, due to import tariffs with China and almost non-existent domestic production of LFP, which reduces their cost advantages. “This will be exacerbated by the unfavourable economics of recycling LFP versus NMC. “In addition, many companies are looking at cobalt-free or low-cobalt variants of NMC, which would further reduce LFP’s cost advantage,” they said.
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