DOE Awards $50M to Coreshell Technologies & AM Batteries for Domestic Anode Production

One topic that I do my best to stay on top of is the inseparability between rising adoption of metal additive manufacturing (AM) and the growing awareness of a need to build resilience into critical minerals supply chains. The latter clearly represents a much larger scope of activity than the former, but precisely for that reason, metal AM’s primary long-term value ultimately lies in its being situated within the ongoing, global rearrangement of critical minerals supply and demand relationships.

Among other factors, the anticipated sustained boom in battery demand over the next decade is a major driver pushing nations outside of China to get a bit more proactive, and collaborative, about securing their critical minerals supplies. The AM industries in the relevant countries — many, but by no means all, located in the West — should benefit greatly from that dynamic, with objectives including the scale-up of new recycling techniques and heightened R&D investment figuring as focal points of the new international partnerships.

A new $50 million contract that the US Department of Energy (DOE) just awarded to Bay Area company Coreshell Technologies points in the direction of how the critical minerals/AM nexus could grow in years ahead, even as the funding comes from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was passed years ago under President Biden. (Indeed, the fact that this is where the money came from emphasizes just how long all this will take.) Coreshell uses metallurgical silicon (MGS) as a replacement for graphite in lithium-ion battery anodes, a mineral that China is responsible for supplying well over 90 percent of globally. The subrecipient of the DOE contract, Massachusetts-based AM Batteries, is working with Coreshell to incorporate the dry-coating process for the battery cathodes.

According to the two companies, the DOE grant will enable them to build facilities capable of supplying 2 gigawatt hours of electrode manufacturing capacity and 1.5 gigawatt hours of cell assembly capacity domestically, thereby creating over 100 jobs. The companies claim that their process is compliant with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and that it is the first scalable process in the US that can completely eliminate Chinese minerals from the battery supply chain.

AM Batteries, founded in 2020, leverages a proprietary roll-to-roll (R2R) AM process that incorporates powder deposition to bypass limitations associated with conventional battery manufacturing methods. AM Batteries claims that its process is both more cost-efficient and less environmentally destructive than the industry standard based on wet slurry coating.

In my writing about AM’s impact on the semicap market, I’ve focused mainly on advanced packaging methods, many of which also leverage R2R processes. The more I’ve paid attention to that market segment, the more it appears to me that the Western AM industry largely ignores it simply because it doesn’t fit the arbitrarily determined categories that define what constitutes “AM.”

Nonetheless, TDK Ventures, which has been an investor in AM Batteries since the seed round, specifically referred to it as a “precision additive manufacturing” technique in its announcement of its initial investment. Earlier this year, of course, the parent company acquired Fabric8Labs, another company whose production process doesn’t fit conventional definitions of AM, but counts as AM all the same.

Anzu Partners, another regular investor in the AM industry, led the $25 million Series A for AM Batteries, and the startup has also received funding from Toyota Ventures. R2R seems to be drawing significant interest despite being overlooked by what is, ostensibly, the industry that should find it most interesting. Perhaps how these things are defined only matters insofar as there’s overlap between the more niche processes and the ones that have been designated as part of the 3D printing industry. But along those lines, there is surely extensive overlap in the materials and software used, as well as the relevant labor pools, if not the machines themselves. One consequence of this is that the AM industry is almost certainly much larger than is typically understood, at least in the US.

Featured image courtesy of Coreshell Technologies