Who is the most promising metal for future new energy vehicle batteries? Nickel deserves it!

This can be felt from Tesla CEO Musk's expression.

Over the past year, Musk has repeatedly stood up for nickel. He has said that he “will maximize the use of nickel and reduce cobalt to zero” and that “if you mine nickel efficiently

and in an environmentally sensitive way, Tesla will give you a huge long-term contract.”

In January this year, Musk stated that “nickel is our biggest bottleneck”. on the evening of February 25th, he tweeted that the biggest problem for Tesla to expand its lithium-ion battery production is “lack of nickel”.

Indeed, in the wave of new energy vehicle development, due to the dual factors of battery technology level and rapid growth in automobile scale, nickel demand continues to expand.

A new round of resource grabbing war has begun, China's nickel resource reserves account for only 3%, under this disadvantage, can we still keep up? Do Chinese companies already have a competitive level of technology? As a raw material for batteries, where is the main technology path for nickel?

Vale estimates that in the electric vehicle sector, nickel demand for 2030 is expected to exceed 890,000 tons, with aggressive estimates expected to reach 1.7 million tons. The share of battery nickel demand will increase to 37%, thus making batteries the second largest demand area for nickel.

This means that in the next ten years, nickel demand in the field of new energy vehicles will grow 8 to 16 times.

In front of the huge demand, nickel supply shortage concerns. Frequent shouting “high nickel low cobalt” Musk has repeatedly called for more nickel mining, he even stated that “nickel is our biggest bottleneck”.

There are different options for battery materials for electric vehicles, such as solid-state lithium batteries. Last month, Harvard University independently developed a new type of solid-state lithium battery, which can be fully charged in just 3 minutes, and has a service life of more than 10,000 times.

Today we're looking at another special material, nickel foil, which allows a standard electric car battery to be fully charged in about 10 minutes by adding a thin layer of nickel to the inside of the battery. This could provide a more economical alternative to electric cars with multiple expensive battery packs.

For example, on a trip in a conventional long-range electric car, a 120-kWh battery pack that takes an hour to fully charge could be replaced with a 60-kWh battery pack that only takes 10 minutes to charge, and the range of the two would remain very similar.

The study, published in the Oct. 12 issue of Nature, was conducted by a number of researchers, including Chao-Yang Wang, distinguished professor of materials and engineering at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Chao-Yang Wang is an expert scholar in the field of fuel cells and secondary batteries, and was elected in December 2019 to the National Academy of Inventors.