Japanese battery producer Panasonic Energy plans to procure 10,000t of synthetic graphite from Australian battery materials and technology developer Novonix's plant in the US state of Tennessee.
Panasonic Energy this month signed a binding offtake agreement to buy synthetic graphite over four years from 2025-28. It will use the material at its existing electric vehicle (EV) battery manufacturing plant in Nevada and a planned facility in Kansas.
The graphite supplied by Novonix has lower CO2 emissions, as its proprietary graphitisation furnaces enable efficient mass production in just around three days per production cycle. This can be compared with conventional Acheson furnaces that require 30 days per cycle with temperatures reaching up to 3,000°C, Panasonic Energy said.
Panasonic Energy aims to halve the carbon footprint of its entire lithium-ion battery supply chain for EVs by the April 2030-March 2031 fiscal year, based on 2021-2022 levels.
Panasonic Energy currently uses natural graphite and synthetic graphite for lithium-oil batteries, but it has declined to disclose its annual consumption of the material. But its domestic and overseas plants have battery production capacities of 12 GWh/yr and 38 GWh/yr respectively. The firm aims to expand its production capacity globally to 200 GWh/yr in 2030, but a breakdown by geography is unavailable.
