Canadian battery developer Nano One Materials has signed an agreement with an unnamed international OEM. Nano One is working on a research project with Volkswagen, among others.
The value of the purchase order is 550,000 Canadian dollars (around 370,000 euros), according to the company. Both companies intend to jointly evaluate processes and innovative cathode raw materials for lithium-ion batteries with high energy density in automotive applications.
The aim of this cooperation is to improve the stability and service life of nickel-enriched cathode raw materials for use in electric vehicles. As early as 2016, Nano One reported that it had succeeded in producing cathode material for cobalt-free lithium-ion high-voltage batteries.
The current cooperation had already begun in 2018 and will now be “put on a formal footing” with this agreement. Further details of the project, including financial details, are apparently all strictly confidential.
For this reason it is surprising that Nano-One boss Dan Blondal nevertheless continues to comment on the anonymous client in the press release. “Our project partner is a world market leader in terms of innovative developments and the marketing of state-of-the-art technologies,” says Blondal. “We are very excited to be working with a company that is at the forefront of the electric vehicle revolution,” says Blondal.
This statement becomes interesting against the background of an announcement made at the end of May: At that time, Nano One announced that it had received a grant of five million US dollars for the “Scaling Advanced Battery Materials” project. Pulead Technology and Saint-Gobain are also involved in the project. At the same time, Blodal revealed that “..Volkswagen Group Research will join our consortium as a project member.”
This does not necessarily mean that the unnamed international OEM is necessarily Volkswagen. However, in view of the speed at which VW intends to bring electric cars onto the market on a large scale, this would be a likely option. Most recently, Volkswagen announced that it wanted to set up a battery production facility in Salzgitter together with the Swedish company Northvolt. VW has not yet awarded the contracts for some of the electric cars planned until 2025. When asked by our German colleagues at electrive.net, Volkswagen declined to comment on the possibility.
In this latest presentation, Nano One has also presented Tesla and the Chinese group BYD as its project partners.
Source: electrive
