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LEADERSHIP SPEAK
Making Li-ion battery manufacturing a reality in India Vikram Handa, Managing Director - Epsilon Carbon, talks about commissioning of India’s first-ever LIB material manufacturing facility, their plans of expansion, and vision for 2021 and beyond. What is the manufacturing capacity of Epsilon’s LIB facility and your plans with regards to investments and expansion? Epsilon Carbon has formed a subsidiary, Epsilon Advanced Materials to enter the fast-growing LIB material space. We have currently commissioned our manufacturing unit with a capacity of 2500 tons per year (TPA) of anode precursor material with pilot facilities for further processing into synthetic graphite, which is the final anode active material. Apart from the manufacturing unit, we have set up a comprehensive laboratory to test synthetic graphite in a coin and pouch cell format. This aids us in quality control as well as a tool for continuous product development. We plan to further ramp up our capacity to 15,000 TPA by 2021 and eventually to 50,000 TPA by 2025 with an investment of `500 crore in the next four years to scale up our capacity. We are also studying how to manufacture other key raw materials for LIB cells and lithium battery recycling. China has been dominant supplier of graphite, a key element in Li-ion battery cells. How does Epsilon Carbon plan to end this domination and aid indigenous manufacturing? Epsilon Advanced Materials’ key advantage is full backward integration of raw material from Epsilon Carbon -the parent company. Epsilon Carbon in turn has long term agreements for sourcing of coal tar from steel plants within India. This complete backward integration allows us to produce very consistent raw materials for the LIB supply chain. Our integrated carbon complex location in Karnataka shares a lot of utilities within the units and all intermediate products are transported via closed pipelines
Vikram Handa. Source: Epsilon
therefore avoiding contamination and reducing logistic costs. The anode is 25 percent of the cell by volume (depending on the chemistry) and we hope to support Indian cell manufactures by providing them this key raw material within India. Today, we are manufacturing for China, Japan, and Europe mainly and trials have been initiated with anode material producers and cell manufactures globally to start the testing and qualification phase. This is a key step towards company’s evolution plan to become the world’s first vertically integrated and sustainable producer of highperformance synthetic anode material in LIB supply chain. We a i m t o s u p p o r t c e l l manufacturers that set up facilities in India and are in touch with companies who are exploring setting up cell manufacturing facility in India.
| November-December 2020
The supply of raw and refined material needed for the manufacturing of Li-ion batteries is extremely critical, how will Epsilon Carbon meet the accelerating demand? Epsilon Carbon currently processes 350,000 tons of coal tar in India and we expect the coal tar availability to increase to a million tons in the next seven years. Raw material security is our key advantage and gives customers in China, Japan, and Europe the comfort that we will be able to ramp up our volumes and support them with consistent synthetic graphite material as their demand for raw material increases. Another key raw material for manufacturing synthetic anodes is power, and we are able to provide that from Epsilon Carbon through the waste gases from our Carbon Black factory which is also located within the Integrated Carbon Complex.
