The city of Bitterfeld-Wolfen, once synonymous with environmental crisis due to its heavy industry and mining, is poised to be a key location in Germany’s ambitious green transition.
It is here that the first large lithium refinery in the country has been installed, with the aim of playing a central role in a European project to extract and refine its own raw materials to have a fleet of state-of-the-art vehicles.
The white powder that the plant will start generating from May is a key element in electric car batteries and is part of the European Union’s recipe for reducing its dependence on foreign imports.
The take-off in battery demand is “predictable,” said Stefan Scherer, AMG’s chief executive, and his company has “reason to ride the wave. “
Bitterfeld-Wolfen in eastern Germany chose the space for the new plant because of its “proximity to customers,” Scherer explained.
Locating the factory closer to battery makers may simply counteract source dangers for Europe, whose reliance on imports is now seen as a drag amid developing geopolitical tensions, specifically with China.
The Asian giant is the largest manufacturer of crude lithium, but owns most of the world’s processing capacity, as well as much of the battery production.
Exposure to potentially unreliable suppliers – and a preference for owning a larger share of the industry – are the EU’s plans revealed last year to increase domestic extraction and processing of lithium and 33 other “critical” materials.
“We are already in talks with politicians to discuss the financial resources for future expansion,” said Scherer, whose factory is at the center of the new network.
The first module at the AMG plant will be capable of generating 20,000 tons of lithium hydroxide a year, enough for about a fraction of a million car batteries, depending on their size, Scherer said.
More units could be added over time to increase production fivefold to 100,000 tonnes, enough to cover “up to 20 percent” of the demand in Europe, he speculated.
The EU’s plan for material safety aims to reach 40% of the processing of nationally designated critical tissues by 2030.
For German industry, and especially automakers, bringing lithium production closer to home “increases their resilience in the event of stress in the foreign supply chain,” said Yoann Gimbert, electric mobility analyst at Tank Transport and Environment.
Companies that want to temporarily exchange raw fabrics to obtain a product that meets their criteria can be a good example.
“Instead of having to painstakingly ship those boxes to Asia Hamburg, you can bring them here to Bitterfeld over a hundred kilometers, either by truck or preferably by exercising, and we can change them almost in a few days,” Scherer said.
Although AMG’s order will first be supplied with lithium from the company’s mine in Brazil, it is possible that the raw product will eventually arrive from a closer location.
Near the Franco-German border, the Australian company Vulcan Energy announced in late 2017 a pilot mission to remove lithium from groundwater.
Closer to Bitterfeld-Wolfen, in Zinnwald, a small village near the Czech border, an AMG-backed project is bringing the traditional to the extraction of lithium minerals from the ground.
Locally sourcing gigantic amounts of lithium will prove more difficult, as reflected in the European Union’s more modest extraction target of 10%.
But projects like the one in Zinnwald could still be a “vital cog”, Zinnwald Lithium’s CEO Anton du Plessis told AFP.
To anchor green industries in the EU, “you want to make sure you have the global supply chain,” adding extraction, said du Plessis, who expects the Zinnwald mine to be fully operational by the end of the decade.
Even if extraction is a partial solution, the new processing capacity planned in Europe could simply “completely cover demand,” said Cornelius Baehr, an analyst at IW Consult.
The finishing touch on all those projects remains uncertain, Baehr said, and timelines for setting up new production sites (between five and 10 years) mean the EU’s 2030 target “will be easy to achieve. “
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