Silicon anodes prepare for mainstream deployment with production capacity set to triple in 2024

The silicon anode industry’s production capacity is rapidly growing, indicating to the market that it is ready to hit themainstream.

Over 500 gigawatt-hours of capacity forsilicon-containing anodematerial production is expected to be online by the end of 2024, up 234% from 2023, according toBenchmark’s Silicon Anode Forecast.

“Innovation has got us to the point today where we have seen serious capital commitments and capacity expansion announced signalling a change in the sentiment around mass adoption of silicon anodes,” Rory McNulty, a next-generation battery analyst at Benchmark, said.

Asia leads

As with graphite anode materials, China controls most of the production of silicon anodes with almost 70% market share. South Korea is the second largest producer, forecast to produce almost a quarter of this year’s supply.

Daejoo Electronic Materials, a South Korean producer, is the largest silicon anode producer in 2024. Benchmark forecasts the company will represent 22% of this year’s production.

BTR and Gotion High-Tech, both operating in China, are the second- and third-largest producers with 10% and 9.6% of global supply, respectively.

Traditional silicon vs next-gen silicon anodes

Between 3% and 8% by weight of silicon has been blended into traditional graphite anodes for several years to boost the capacity of the battery. Increasing the silicon content further can greatly improve performance, but the material expands and contracts by up to 300% which can cause the battery to degrade much faster as silicon content increases.

“Silicon anodes have been around as a concept for a long time and have been in several state-of-the-art anodes for many years,” McNulty said. “However, overcoming the accelerated degradation of these traditional materials–finding a balance between performance enhancement and battery lifetime–has proven challenging.”

This traditional silicon-containing anode market is largely dominated by Chinese capacity announcements, with some supply coming from South Korea and Japan. Once fully optimised, such blending could increase anode capacity by up to 60%.

Next-generation silicon anodeshave started to address the challenges associated with high percentages of silicon through engineering the nano-structure of the materials.

This is much more of a global trend, withNorth American innovators leading the chargeand Chinese companies starting to compete.

“Here, innovators are looking to provide materials that can enable high-performance applications, with opportunities to tailor blends in a similar way to traditional materials to suit the performance profile needed for a given application,” McNulty said.

Capacity vs supply

The facilities coming online this year will take time to hit qualification and cost targets for their materials, so there will be a lag between the boosts seen inproduction capacity and realised supplyentering the market.

“If positive progress is made towards these targets, the industry looks ready to accelerate,” McNulty said. “Capacity is a measure of ambition and capital commitment.”

In 2024, Benchmark forecasts there will be 55 GWh of silicon anode production, up from 38 GWh last year.

Benchmark’s new Silicon Anode Forecast provides independent and detailed analysis of supply and demand out to 2040.

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