“There’s a lot of companies — from the upstream suppliers,...

“There’s a lot of companies — from the upstream suppliers, miners, all the way through to end users and people developing EVs or energy storage systems. It’s really unique how we work across across the entire ecosystem,” says Chris Burns, the founder of Novonix, in an interview with Electric Autonomy at Novonix’s flagship Bedford offices.

Pick the name of any company in the North American EV battery supply chain.

Volkswagen, Umicore, Panasonic, LG Chem, Posco, Samsung, Tesla, Ford, GM, Stellantis.

You can keep going if you like. But odds are overwhelmingly in favour that, if they are making batteries, they’ve knocked on Novonix’s door and their technology has come through the Novonix lab.

Novonix provides assistance in manufacturing pilot-scale cells for R&D purposes, conducts tests and runs material evaluations for its customers. It also does materials research for internal use because the company is now also a direct supplier to battery makers.

“Battery cells are getting commoditized in a general form, but there’s still a huge range of performance,” say Burns.

“At the end of the day, what’s going to be the differentiator between a General Motors vehicle and an equivalent Ford vehicle or Tesla vehicle? Once one of them has a better battery chemistry others will strive to be there.”

A good foundation

Today Novonix has nearly 200 employees in four office locations spread across Canada and the U.S.

For years, McArthur has been developing a new way of producing cathodes in Novonix’s Dartmouth lab. And this isn’t on a small scale, like using a bigger pipette or a different press roller in the manufacturing process.

This is on the scale of taking a process that, traditionally, takes six labour-intensive, costly and high-waste steps and shrinking it down to three clean-and-simple steps for a fraction of the cost.

“Typically the cathode that you’re starting with — the powder — is made through a wet synthesis process called co-precipitation,” explains McArthur gesturing at a slide deck. “That’s all the stuff on the left-hand side — a bunch of boxes going everywhere. It’s just madness.”

“The Novonix all-dry, zero-waste cathode process essentially sidesteps how you’re making the precursor that makes the cathode powder,” says McArthur.

“Our secret sauce, if you will, is how we combine those materials still all in a dry state to make a finished cathode powder.”

Industry implications

This week Novonix released the findings of a third-party study on its dry cathode process.

It says the processing cost reduction is estimated to be 50 per cent (excluding material feedstock). The capital expenditure intensity is estimated to be 30 per cent lower. And the power consumption improvements have the potential to be approximately 25 per cent better.