INSIDE INDIA'S STRUGGLE TO BUILD A BATTERY SUPPLY CHAIN

Battling aggressive Chinese pricing, a new wave of 'midstream' companies is trying to localize critical components

- Megha Mandavia

About three years ago, on a regular sunny August day in Hyderabad, Altmin, the battery materials company, set out to make cathodes, a critical component in lithium-ion batteries, in India for the very first time.

The pilot plant, established within the white walls of the Indian government's International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials (ARCI) in 2023, has scaled up to produce 250kg a day of the critical mineral that constitutes a significant percentage of a battery cell's chemistry today. The scientists at the research centre are Altmin's technology partners, working towards achieving the ambitious goal of localizing the geopolitically critical battery supply chain from rival China.

Now, Altmin is moving towards industrial-scale cathode manufacturing with a 100,000-tonne capacity plant in Telangana. Last month, the company signed an agreement with the state-owned Singareni Collieries Co. Ltd (SCCL) to set up the country's first lithium refinery. The refined lithium will feed into the manufacturing of cathode active materials.

"We started working on the technology a decade back at a laboratory scale with only a couple of scientists. The last few years we have worked on bringing down the costs, solving the teething problems faced with scaling the technology from lab scale to plant scale," said R. Vijay, director at ARCI, an autonomous research and development (R&D) centre under the Department of Science and Technology.