The size of the global lithium-ion battery market will exceed $60 billion by 2024, according to a study by Global Market Insights.

Growing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) coupled with government initiatives to promote sustainable energy use will drive the lithium-ion battery market size.

In 2015, EV registrations witnessed a 70% increase from the previous year with 550,000 vehicles sold across the globe.

According to EIA, China and the US accounted for 336,000 and 159,000 EV sales respectively in 2016.

The Japanese lithium-ion battery market is set to record above 8% in growth by 2024. Positive outlook towards the automotive sector alongside an increase in adoption of smart devices will stimulate demand in lithium-ion battery market.

In 2016, Japan accounted for over 13 GWh of automotive lithium-ion cell manufacturing capacity representing a 237% increase from the 2014 level. Government focus to limit emissions along with a shifting trend towards renewable energy use will further augment the industry growth.

Industrial lithium-ion battery market is to surpass $9 billion by 2024. These products find wide ranging applications across defense and healthcare sector where capacity, energy density and safety are of paramount importance. Ability to provide higher current makes its adoption preferable across heavy industries including mining, oil & gas and construction.

In 2016, the US accounted for over 80% of North America lithium-ion battery market share. Ongoing digitisation of healthcare industry along with shifting trend toward IoTs has resulted increased demand for smart devices in the country. Government initiatives toward adoption of non-conventional fuel vehicles will further enhance the business outlook.

Ongoing investments toward distributed generation coupled with growing demand for off-grid generation technologies will stimulate the product penetration across the energy storage applications. Rapid expansion of micro-grid networks will further provide impetus to industry growth. Nickel manganese cobalt oxide, lithium iron phosphate, and nickel cobalt aluminum oxide are prominent secondary batteries deployed for these applications.

Johnson Controls (NYSE:JCI) and Toshiba (OTCPK:TOSBF, OTCPK:TOSYY) are planning to work together in developing and manufacturing lithium ion batteries, Argus reports, amid a growing shift to electric vehicles from vehicles running on fossil fuels.

Toshiba and JCI’s power solutions unit will cooperate in building a lithium ion battery business, using existing lead-acid battery technology as part of dual-battery systems, at JCI’s plant in Michigan, according to the report.

The companies will aim to achieve higher efficiency, less complexity and lower costs in combining their developed technologies.

The US Department of Energy is launching a major research effort to develop a new generation of lithium-ion batteries largely free of cobalt, a rare and expensive metal delivered through an increasingly troubling supply chain.

The three-year program, part of a broader effort to accelerate advanced vehicle technologies, could eventually lead to cheaper, longer-lasting consumer gadgets, electric cars, and grid storage.

Materials scientist Gerd Ceder is overseeing one project under the research program at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, aimed at developing “disordered rock salts” as an alternative material for cathodes, the positive electrode in a rechargeable cell. Typically, the cathodes in lithium-ion batteries require cobalt to create and retain a layered structure in the electrode, which allows lithium ions to easily flow through it. But several years ago, Ceder and his colleagues found that this new class of materials could store more lithium, potentially boosting energy density while avoiding the need for cobalt entirely (see “Disordered materials hold promise for better batteries”).

The Lawrence Berkeley project as well as two at Argonne National Laboratory together received $12.5 million from the DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office.

In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Ceder discussed the challenges to ensure that the new materials work as a “drop-in” alternative for battery manufacturing, the reasons lithium-ion technology will continue to dominate storage for a long time to come—and why it takes so long for any battery advance to reach the marketplace.

If you’ve been paying attention to the debate about lithium-ion battery materials, then you will know there is a price problem with lithium, but the real market danger is with cobalt.

While experts doubt that cobalt scarcity will halt the growth of the lithium-ion battery business, demand for the metal is affecting battery markets and increasing the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s stranglehold on supplies.

To the uninitiated, this might seem like a major threat to the lithium-ion energy storage business. But it’s not, for the simple reason that not all lithium-ion batteries need cobalt.

Lithium iron phosphate (LFP), lithium manganese oxide (LMO) and lithium titanate (LTO) batteries are cobalt-free.

The catch is that their energy density is lower than that of lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) or lithium nickel cobalt aluminum oxide (NCA) chemistries.

This can make LFP, LMO and LTO batteries somewhat limited for use in electric vehicles, although these chemistries are still touted for use in vehicle electrification, sometimes combined with other ingredients.

Despite their lower energy density, LFP batteries “are definitely safer and offer a cycle life similar to the more common NMC batteries,” said Mitalee Gupta, energy storage analyst with GTM Research.

Plus, they also work for stationary storage and there are many companies that can supply them. Here are 11 to watch.

AESC

Nissan and NEC’s Automotive Energy Supply Corporation makes combined LMO-lithium nickel oxide cells. But the company has been in the news this month after a planned sale of the joint venture to Chinese investment fund GSR Capital fell through. GSR Capital had not been able to find the $903 million needed for the deal, reports said.

BYD

The Chinese coaches-to-storage giant BYD has a line of NMC products for its electric vehicle business but “right now is one of the biggest LFP players in the storage market,” according to Gupta. Last month it unveiled plans for a new Chinese plant with 24 gigawatt-hours of production capacity a year, as part of a road map to reach 60 gigawatt-hours by 2020.

CALB

Like BYD, the China Aviation Lithium Battery Co. makes LFP and NMC lithium-ion batteries. It was the tenth-largest supplier of electric bus batteries in China last year, Chinese data shows.

CATL

Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd is also following a similar path to BYD. Following a wildly successful IPO, the Chinese company is preparing to set up new manufacturing plants in China and Germany. Like CALB, CATL makes both LFP and NMC batteries for the electric bus market.

Conamix

Ithaca, New York startup Conamix has been cagey about its cobalt-free lithium-ion battery technology. And the air of mystery seems to have paid off, with the company last month raising an estimated $2 million in Series A funding from backers including Volta Energy Technologies, a funding plataform for energy technology backed by Exelon and other strategic partners.

As manufacturers make lithium-ion batteries as cheap as they can, they’re removing valuable elements that make them worthwhile to recycle, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.

EPRI assesses the end-of-life cost of batteries in a report it published at the end of last year. Last week, Ben Kaun, the program manager for EPRI’s Energy Storage Program, told members of the Illinois Commerce Commission that the lack of recycling adds an end-of-life cost to lithium-ion batteries.

“Currently in lead-acid 98 percent I think of those systems can get recovered and turned into new lead-acid batteries. It’s almost a fully closed loop,” Kaun told commissioners. “Lithium ion is not like that. There’s not the same kind of level of high-value materials, and a lot of the innovations going on right now in lithium-ion batteries are actually to drive out the remaining high value materials, like cobalt, out of the system.”

The cost of cobalt, which is used as a cathode material in batteries, jumped from $32,500 at the beginning of 2017 to $81,000 in March of this year, according to the Royal Chemistry Society. Battery manufacturers have responded by redesigning batteries to minimize cobalt. In May, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company had all but eliminated cobalt from batteries it uses in automobile and stationary batteries.

That keeps batteries cheap, possibly too cheap to recycle. Without valuable contents recyclers have little incentive to capture used batteries, Kaun said.

“Lithium-ion batteries have not yet developed the same kind of recycling infrastructure that have developed in lead-acid batteries,” he said. “There’s a significant issue that needs to be looked at here and how that recycling infrastructure is going to emerge. Part of it is scale. And part of it is understanding what the incentives are to develop that infrastructure and how you can also up-cycle or at least maintain higher grade battery materials that can be re-manufactured the same way lead-acid can be.”

Without a recycling market, battery owners are left with a disposal cost instead of a recycling incentive.

New York State has awarded Cadenza Innovation funding for a demonstration project featuring Li-ion supercell technology, a standalone system that includes a rack-mounted 200kWh, 50kW battery storage unit. The project is part of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s (NYSERDA) drive to pursue nation-leading clean energy goals, including Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s energy storage target of 1500 megawatts in New York State by 2025. As the pioneering provider of energy storage solutions for license to lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery manufacturers, Cadenza Innovation offers unique cell design that combines the best properties from wound jelly rolls and large prismatic cells. That allows for high energy density at low cost for EV, PHEV, and grid markets.

New York State has access to some of the world’s most promising wind and solar energy resources. However, to fully capitalize on those, next-generation energy storage solutions are necessary. Enter Cadenza Innovation’s technology, which incorporates commercial-grade battery pack systems through novel packaging architecture for Li-ion battery technology. The demonstration project will be a unique design delivering high energy and improved safety at low cost. Cadenza Innovation’s recently patented multicore Li-ion battery cell structure, the supercell, serves as the cornerstone of its novel architecture and provides simplification in battery pack design. That, in turn, greatly reduces production and manufacturing costs, overcomes safety issues, and improves the energy density of Li-ion batteries.

In a private interview in September, 2017, Dr. Lampe-Onnerud, Cadenza Innovation Founder and CEO, alluded to the NYSERDA project. “I believe we are on the cusp of something new and different,” she outlined, tracing how, when New York state suffered through Superstorm Sandy and inoperable generators, they realized they “should do something different. They evaluated policies and saw how our battery architecture is so simple and fire retardant. You can touch it.”

The latter point is important, as Cadenza’s new chemistry and packaging lowers the risk of fires — like the ones that plagued the Boeing Dreamliner, the Samsung Galaxy Note, and a couple of early Tesla Model S sedans.

We normally associate Cornwall in England with scones and cream teas … or, if we are really metal nerds, we associate the sometimes-sunny southeast country of the British Isles with mining (particularly with tin mining).

The area dominated with igneous morphology has been mined since Roman times for tin, copper and a number of other metals.

But one metal, not surprisingly, that has never featured is lithium. I say “not surprisingly” because up to the end of the last century, it barely featured as a metal of value.

Nickel metal hydride batteries dominated the small appliance world and lead acid still served the rest. This century has seen an exponential growth in the use of lithium-ion batteries, from iPhones to electric cars to massive storage barns. The growth has been such that fears are mounting of a market shortage in the next decade, fueled in no small part by state support for electric vehicles (EVs) in Asia.

In fact, so urgent has the situation become that Chinese and Japanese battery makers are quietly buying into or buying up lithium deposits around the world to ensure they have secure supplies. Currently, Europe consumes around 25 percent of the world’s lithium, but is dependent on imports from Australia, Chile, Argentina and China.

Europe has been rather slow out of the blocks — European carmakers have ambitious plans to roll out an EV model for every one of their ranges by the end of this decade, but they have little or no security of supply over the raw material supply chain. Two AIM-listed companies are seeking to change that and create Europe’s first continental supplies.

In Cornwall, Cornish Lithium has partnered with the state-backed Satellite Applications Catapult to use satellite imaging to detect the signatures left by lithium deposits deep underground. Lithium is present in brines deep underground, up to 1 kilometer underground, according to a Telegraph article. Cornwall Cornish Lithium hopes the survey will identify economic deposits, and Innovate UK agrees, investing well over a $1 million in a pilot.

Across the Bay of Biscay in the considerably warmer but no less back of beyond northern region of Portugal, another opportunity is being created. AIM-listed Savannah Resources has announced a 52 percent upgrade to its proven resources at the Mina do Barroso lithium project in northern Portugal, The Telegraph explains.

Panasonic looks likely to begin producing a lithium-ion battery batteries in China in partnership with Tesla. The announcement came from the company’s CEO Kazuhiro Tsuga on the occasion of the earning conference for its 2018 financials, which was held on Thursday, according to Reuters.

No more details, however, were given about the factory’s size or the amount of the required investment for project.

Earlier this year, Panasonic started manufacturing lithium-ion batteries for Tesla’s energy storage products and electric vehicles in the U.S. state of Nevada – at its much fabled Gigafactory. The two companies also collaborated on the production heterojunction with intrinsic thin layer (HIT) solar cells in Buffalo, New York.

The group’s solar business, however, was listed among the low-profitable divisions for last year, although the Eco Solutions segment, in which battery storage and solar is included, saw revenues and profits  increase slightly. The Eco Solutions segment registered a 4.5% increase in sales at JPY 1,623.5 billion. The division operating profit also grew slightly from JPY 64.2 billion to JPY 72.5 million.

In particular, Panasonic’s electrical construction materials business in India, Turkey and Vietnam, water-related products in Japan, as well as the heat-exchanging ventilation units in China, and electrical construction materials business, contributed to the positive results of the segment in the latest fiscal year.

As for its solar business, Panasonic said in its financial statements that it started selling individual cells in addition to its conventional module sales, and that it has reviewed the module production structure, including winding up module production at its Shiga plant. Operations at Shiga were expected to be shut down by the end of the first quarter of this year. Earlier this year, Panasonic ceased production of silicon ingots at a factory in the U.S. state of Oregon.

While lightweight lithium-ion batteries are ideal for electric cars, they are also quite expensive – and therefore unsuitable for large-scale, stationary power storage, claimed scientists from ETH Zurich and Empa in Switzerland.

Instead, the team identified two new materials that could improve cheap aluminium batteries. The first was titanium nitride, a corrosion-resistant ceramic material.

The electrolyte fluid in aluminium batteries is extremely aggressive and corrosive, even damaging gold and platinum, so the team searched for a hardy replacement. Lead researcher Maksym Kovalenko and colleagues said they found what they were looking for with titanium nitride, an easy-to-manufacture compound made of abundant titanium and nitrogen.

The scientists made batteries with conductive parts made of titanium nitride in the laboratory. The material can form thin films, coat other materials or even be printed on to plastic for greater flexibility.

The second identified material was polypyrene, which could act as the positive electrode in a new generation of low-cost aluminium batteries. While the negative electrodes are made of aluminium, the positive pole is usually graphite, a mineral which is resistant to modification.

Instead, the team used polypyrene, which rivals graphite in energy storage. Properties such as porosity can also be adapted, the researchers said, meaning it can be optimised for specific applications.